The one condition that separates the best All-Mountain West skis from the merely excellent is crud. It’s the dream of perpetual powder that drives the category – there’s no other reason to have a ski this wide – but the reality is uncut powder is over and done within the first few minutes after any big mountain’s opening bell. Then you have to navigate a wildly variable condition that continues to deteriorate hour by hour. The skis no longer have a clean surface to plane over and the tracked –up terrain tugs them in multi-axis directions. The only way to prevail is to gun it, which on a weak reed will feel like very bad advice.
The Stöckli Stormrider 95 gets it. It knows that the winning strategy is to pummel crud into submission. You don’t have to pick a line, for the Stormrider 95 will create its own path through the rubble. All the pilot has to do is move his feet across the fall line and otherwise remain calm, poised and aimed downhill.
Not everyone is constitutionally equipped for this exercise. If the idea of blazing down a 40-degree pitch covered in total crap sounds more insane than idyllic, there are plenty of Finesse skis in the AMW genre to serve you. But for those who revel in busting through wind berms, there’s only a fistful of models that feel comfortable in the chaos of high-speed crud skiing. The Stormrider 95 is arguably the best in the world at this game.
If you digest all the brochure copy expended on All-Mountain East models, you’ll find somewhere in every model description that it’s a “50/50” model, meaning it’s equally suited to skiing on-trail or off. What this seemingly innocuous shorthand term for a versatile ski masks is that no ski can ever truly be half-and-half, for every model is part of a design family that ‘s inherently biased to one side of the mountain or the other.
This prelude explains why Salomon felt compelled to create a second off-trail line, named Stance, when they already had a successful freeride series in the QST’s. The latter are unmistakably meant for the off-piste, while the Stance 90 tilts the 50/50 equation in favor of Frontside features, beginning with two sheets of Titanal and a shallower sidecut with a more slender silhouette that’s quicker edge to edge. Its square tail in particular is appreciably narrower than the norm in the AME genre, which keeps its orientation down the fall line. The impression of quickness off the edge is enhanced by its lightweight design that in fact weighs less than the QST 92 and far less than Salomon’s Frontside flagship, the S/Force Bold. Its lightweight structure certainly contributed to our testers giving it higher aggregate scores for Finesse properties versus Power attributes, the only one of our top eight Recommended models to do so.
The American skier’s ongoing infatuation with fat skis has so distorted our collective notion of what an all-terrain ski should look like that we no longer remember the days when the best skiers’ everyday ride was a race ski or something similar. As recently as the late 1990’s, a ski as wide as Dynastar’s Speed Zone 4×4 82 Pro would have been regarded as a powder-only behemoth.
The 20/21 4×4 is attached to the Speed Zone family, but it’s actually a separate breed. In keeping with the overall trend to lighter skis, the 4×4 82 Pro uses a multi-material core with laminated beech providing the primary structure and a band of polyurethane (PU) between the wood and the outer sidewall. The PU adds a dampening element as well as being lighter than the wood it replaces.
For a ski with a race lineage, the 4×4 82 Pro is oddly more in its element off-trail than on, as it transitions from a carve to a scrubbed turn without a hitch. Peter Glenn’s Steve Parnell was impressed by its versatility as he navigated through a melee of spring conditions at Squaw Valley. “Went from groomed to crust to powder today. This one will make your day. Made it all easy.”
A well-balanced ski with nearly equal scores for all performance criteria, it should have a broad appeal across all ages and abilities.
Tester: Madeline Dunn
The entire Santa Ana collection this year blew me away. Growing up as a Junior Olympic and NorAm level ski racer, I expect excellence when it comes to big mountain skis. I need a ski that can turn on a dime, float in the powder and rip the groomers, often on the same run.
This Santa Ana 93 does just that for me, day after day. It’s my go-to ski for any day that I plan to take at least a few groomer laps, knowing I’ll be off-piste on every other run. Being a racer, I never gave up that desire for the best and most responsive equipment. I grew up racing on Nordica and still ski their entire quiver to this day.
This year’s collection of Santa Ana skis dials down the dosage of metal to a single sheet of Titanal that varies in dimension by model and size. As a female who has skied both the Enforcer and Santa Ana collection, this shift to one piece of metal instead of two in the women’s line has been a game changer for the brand. One piece of metal delivers just the right amount of sturdiness while also keeping the ski lighter for a lady that likes to ski bell-to-bell.
