Author Topic: 'All-mountain' skis and the occasional skier  (Read 1229 times)

Johnny2R

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Re: 'All-mountain' skis and the occasional skier
« on: January 30, 2012, 03:01:03 am »
A little follow-up to this posting from earlier...

I had a great trip, and hired what turned out to be the perfect skis for the job. The hire shop didn't appear to have anything between 72mm and 90mm waist, strangely, obviously catering either for people who were skiing fully on piste or fully off, but not for people like myself wanting to do a varying mix. I went for a pair of Scott Crusades, in 169cm length, as they had a decent dual-radius sidecut to go with their 90mm waist (130/90/118mm), offering something like a 13.5m turn radius.

I was wary about the effect on edge-to-edge time with the 90mm waist as I had never skied anything wider than 82mm before (I've never had much luck in terms of powder dumps on my ski trips so have never had the need for anything wide). But I needn't have worried. Within a couple of runs I had adjusted and was amazed at how well the skis carved tight turns. I spent quite a bit of time on piste doing the juiciest GS turns I've ever done (a few things really clicked into place with my self-taught PMTS technique this week), as well as much shorter radius turns (my imperfect versions of the PMTS 'bullet-proof short radius turn') and except maybe on the steepest, hardest, scraped slopes, I never felt any need for a more standard piste ski (and even those slopes I skied better than I've ever done before). Sure, with slalom skis I could have carved shorter radius turns but the turns I was making were small enough.

Hardly any new snow had fallen for 3 weeks (although snow cover was very good), so the off-piste consisted mainly of venturing across areas of wind-blown crusty crud seeking out patches of the softer stuff, and the skis were wonderful for this. Where we did come across areas of rather heavy powder, the skis floated beautifully and were a revelation to me. On the last skiing day, snow was falling lightly and by mid-afternoon maybe 3-4 inches of powder had softened everything up, encouraging us to venture into some nice tree areas. I didn't find any conditions for which I didn't reckon the Crusades were anything other than the perfect ski.

So, in summary, I seem to have managed to get hold of something which I didn't really think was possible, a ski which was much better and much easier to use off-piste than narrow piste skis, yet which allowed me to do the best piste skiing I've ever done. I didn't get the chance to try them in deep new snow (which, of course, we woke to on the morning we were leaving :)), but feel confident they would have provided me with sufficient flotation if I had done so.

There aren't a lot of wider skis with pronounced sidecut (Harald Harb raves about the Movement Jam), but this is definitely the category of ski I will be looking for in the future, if I can't get hold of the Scott Crusade itself.