The Ranger 99 Ti seems to be a ski without bias. It could care less about snow conditions, has no qualms about long turns at high speeds or short arcs at a snail’s pace and can switch from a drift to a carve in mid-turn. Its monotonously good scores were above our Recommended cut line for every attribute we measure.
Another bias that the Ranger 99 Ti eschews is any trace of gender bias. The men’s and women’s versions are identical save for the decoration on the topsheet, and Fischer’s rationale for this homogeneity holds water. At this skill level, men and women tend to ski alike, so the need for a differentiated women’s product is little to none. Our female testers validated this approach, praising the 99 Ti in particular for its off-piste performance. Our male testers laud the Ranger 99 Ti’s agility for a ski of its girth, calling it “best short turns of the big mountain, soft snow skis.”
By tweaking everything – core, baseline, sidewalls – Fischer transformed this commercially important model from what was once a lightweight who got beat up by mean conditions like hard snow or chunky crud into a lean machine that doesn’t take any crap from any kind of snow, no matter what the Eskimos call it. The Ranger 99 Ti deserves to be considered among the first rank of All-Mountain West models.
Fischer’s Ranger series of off-trail skis is split into two distinct camps. Those with a “Ti” suffix include two sheets of Titanal that deliver the enhanced edge grip and shock damping that are the hallmarks of the aluminum alloy. Those with “FR” in their name use fiberglass as the main structural component, with a dash of carbon in the tip to lower swingweight and buffer the forebody.
The Ranger 102 FR’s frisky attitude is perfect for the Finesse skier who doesn’t want to plow through pow on a metal-laden battleship but prefers to playfully pounce in and out of it. An outward sign of its inner desire to let its freak flag fly is a twin-tipped baseline that would rather drift over snow than drive through it. A big sweet spot that’s easy to balance on makes it simple for skiers of any skill set to keep up with Ranger 102 FR’s smooth moves.
When it has a little cushion of snow to push against, the skier can compress the camber pocket underfoot, loading its fiberglass laminates so they recoil off the edge with enough energy to carry the skier across the fall line. Deep snow fills the gaps under its double-rockered baseline, stabilizing the entire chassis. All the skier needs to do is initiate a mid-radius rhythm down the fall line and the Ranger 102 FR will take over from there.
Let the record show that no ski made as giant a leap forward last year as the Salomon QST 92. In its two earlier incarnations it barely met our Recommended minimum standards, hanging by a thread on the tail end of the Finesse ski standings. Now it resides near the top of our Finesse rankings, and the result is no fluke.
When Salomon introduced the QST line, it needed to hit multiple price points, so the wider skis got the best tech while the lower-priced QST 92 was built less expensively. In 2020, the QST 92 got the same treatment as its wider mates, the QST 99 and QST 106, and the difference was evident from the first edge set.
The current QST 92 has more of everything you want – edging power on trail, a better shape for off-trail, a more solid platform – and less of what you don’t want: tip chatter, indifferent grip, overall looseness. Salomon pulled off this coup by reconfiguring how it used its primary components, flax, basalt and, of course, carbon. The basalt and carbon are woven together in an end-to-end matrix, while the flax gets its own mat directly underfoot. An all-poplar core is reinforced by a patch of Titanal in the mid-section and finished with new cork inserts in the tip and tail.
One reason the QST 106 is able to impose its will on combative crud, is it isn’t as light as you might expect for the flagship of a series dedicated to off-trail travel. Although it deploys a combination of fibers as its primary structural element – which doesn’t sound heavy – its stout sidewalls and Ti plate contribute to a total weight that’s roughly average for the genre.
I confess I’ve been maintaining a soft-snow-days only liaison with a QST 106 since we first met, so my bias in its favor is engrained. I’m now seeing a 181cm 106, which strikes me as the perfect blend of flotation for soft snow and grip on hard snow. Instead of dreading the latter, I find the QST 106 to be so natural and imbued with fluid fortitude that I stop noticing its width and simply ski. Even as the rpm’s ascend it stays the course, riding a laid-over edge with the confidence of a soft GS race ski.
When all its scores are tallied, the QST 106 ranks as one of the three best skis in the Big Mountain genre. Salomon hasn’t made a ski this good since the legendary X-Scream. The QST 106 is the best current embodiment of Salomon’s tradition of innovation in ski design.
Because of its brilliant balance between Power and Finesse virtues, we again award the QST 106 a Silver Skier Selection.
You can tell a lot about a ski by its immediate family. Rossi’s Hero Elite Plus Ti is closely related to the Hero Elite LT Ti and ST Ti, both legit non-FIS Race models, even though the Plus Ti’s plus-sized shape (78mm) is many mm’s more ample than the 71mm waist of the LT Ti and 68mm midriff on the SL Ti. The Hero Elite Plus Ti not only uses the same construction as its gate-bashing sibs, its sidecut radius is the same as the ST’s in the167cm size preferred by slalom specialists.
Three years ago, Rossi converted all of the Hero Elite clan to a new damping system, Line Control Technology (LCT). Instead of using horizontal sheets of Titanal, as has been the case for decades among race models, LCT uses a vertical Ti laminate down the center of the ski so the forebody is more resistant to deflection. Torsional rigidity is softened a tad to allow the deep sidecut to engage gradually and progressively as the ski is tipped and pressured.
Advanced skiers who wouldn’t ordinarily care to expend the energy required to control a true race ski shouldn’t allow the Hero Elite Plus Ti’s pedigree to scare them away. It’s amenable to making any turn shape and is well-behaved whether puttering along at an intermediate’s cross-hill crawl or assisting an expert’s all-out assault on the fall line.
