I recently sat down with Tad Elliott to lecture him about klister skiing. Tad is an accomplished racer, with many of his most impressive classic race performances coming in klister conditions. But when it comes to skis and waxing he’s a spoiled Colorado kid without much experience. Actually, I’m being unkind. For a western guy […]

For the past five years Amy and I have split our ski selection obligations out over two trips to Europe; one in the spring, and one in the late summer or early fall. The later trip has turned out to be the one we’ve enjoyed the most, as we’ve managed to work-in some spectacular mini-vacation […]

In my last update I wrote a pretty introspective piece about lying on the ground in the woods, broken. I had been through a round of surgeries, and was in the midst of the weeks-long series of medical procedures involved in putting my leg back together. A lot has happened since then; in fact, the […]

“How is your pain, on a scale from one to ten?” I was lying on my left side, with my cheek in the dirt, because it was the only position I could be in that was remotely tolerable. Tony Coven was my first responder, and it was Tony asking the question. Tony was the answer […]

Amy and I are in terminal E at Logan Airport, ready to board a flight to Munich for our first ski picking trip of the year. Gunnar skipped school for the day to come down to Boston with us and meet Amy’s mom, who flew in to spend a couple of weeks with the boy […]

Last August we visited the Ski Trab factory in Bormio, Italy. We spent a little time with Adriano and Daniele Trabucchi – the brothers who run the company, and we reviewed the design, materials, and construction of the skis. And in the winter we had a good fleet of demo skis to work with on […]

What can we say about Fischer? As a brand they dominate racing, from citizen racing all the way to the World Cup. Since FIS started tracking world cup brand rankings in 2008 Fischer has been the leader in every discipline, every year, for both men and women. The margins have generally been large. This year […]

We make every attempt to remain neutral in our brand preferences, and we have good relationships with all of the brands we work with. But I’ll admit that we’ve got a bit of a family bias toward Madshus, and find ourselves spending a lot of time on REDline skis. Part of that is because Gunnar […]

We’re just about one month away from our first ski selection trip of the year. As we gather orders and build our pick-list, we’re putting out some information on what we learned from the past season, and what we expect from our big industry partners in the next season. There is a lot of good […]

Today’s cold snowfall notwithstanding, we’re calling it spring here, and have starting spring cleaning. Yesterday I tackled the kitchen pantry, and Amy reviewed all of our wax inventory in order to put old packaging on sale at clearance prices. In the next couple of days I’ll sort out our demo ski inventory and will put […]