On Saturday Amy and I will return to Europe for our second ski selection trip of the year, and we’ll spend a week in Norway where we’ll be working with the first full production of Madshus Redline 2.0 skis. The Redline 2.0 model is coming for the 2018-19 season in a limited release. The standard […]

We’ve just wrapped up an early season visit with Jean-Marc Draeyer, and the famous ski-farmer Willi Engelhardt (https://youtu.be/NZZ_Q0bNlQk) at Salomon’s factory in Altenmarkt. We selected a handful of skis for our 2018 order, but mostly we spent a bunch of time going over the new inventory – in particular, learning the parameters and variation in […]

No news is good news? With lots of news of new models from other brands, Fischer has been pretty quiet, and this is nothing new. In spite of rolling out a major change in their material with the introduction of the Speedmax models, followed by a substantive in-line adjustment to their geometry in 2015, their […]

As promised, today and tomorrow – April 30th and May 1st – your orders will generate donations to Protect Our Winters. For each pair of skis ordered during these two days, we will donate $100 to POW. Why do we do this? We’ve discussed it at length in our previous post announcing the program – check […]

Skin skis have officially become a phenomenon in the industry. The idea was first introduced in the 1970s, and was even used successfully in competition. But it wasn’t until the introduction of the Atomic Skintec in 2011 that factory produced skin skis really became a thing. In the past several years the offerings from all […]

Last September I wrote about an ambitious development project that Madshus had undertaken, in which they put most of the variables in their ski design on the table for review and revision. Our experience with the new ski designs through last spring was limited to a few outings in sub-optimal conditions. But when we went […]

In April of 2017 we decided that we needed to make a meaningful gesture in recognition of the threat posed to our industry and livelihood by climate change. We created a partnership between our customers and our suppliers to donate $100 from each pair of skis ordered on one day (Earth Day) to Protect Our […]

2017-18 Review Salomon has been on a roll in recent years, having launched a series of updates and revisions to their race models that have pushed their ski offerings ever closer to the top of the pile. Last year they finally filled out a full line of S-Lab products with cold, universal, and warm models […]

At midnight on March 23, 2018, my longtime friend Tom and I started the Grand Traverse, a 40-mile backcountry race that starts in Crested Butte, Colorado, and makes its way over Star Pass (among others) to finish in Aspen. This race has been on my bucket list for quite a while, so I was happy […]

Happy Thanksgiving! This spring we ran an Earth Day promotion in which we partnered with our ski suppliers to make a $100 contribution to Protect Our Winters for each pair of skis that was ordered. We had never done anything like that, but we felt strongly that it is the responsibility of all winter sports […]