Studio711.com – Ben Martens

On Saturday I headed to Crystal for my 6th ski day of the season and my first day with the new skis. The parking lots were already pretty full when I rolled in at 8:15 for the 9:00 opening. That’s when I realized it was the first day of the ski schools. That’s usually the busiest weekend of the entire season. Visions of long lines floated through my head but never actually materialized. They started loading the lifts 20 minutes early which helped keep the base crowds down. I chose the gondola and after a couple laps on the Green Valley groomers to make sure the bindings were attached to the skis properly, I headed out to Northway. There wasn’t much fresh snow to really put the new skis to the test, but I did have a lot of fun with them. On fresh groomers, my old skis are marginally better. On anything off the groomers, my new skis are much better. In the really nasty big, icy moguls, these skis are too long to do much good, but then again, I’ve always been bad in those conditions so I’m not a great person to review them in that situation.

I spent most of the day hanging out on the Northway lift. Paradise Bowl provided a number of fun lines and I hiked out to Morning Glory Bowl a couple times. That has a lot fewer tracks because not is it quite hidden from anyone who isn’t looking for it, but you have to take off your skis and hike a few minutes to get there. There was a bit of fluffy snow back there and it got me very excited for the first time that I’ll have a real powder day with these skis.

All in all it was a good day to explore Northway, an area that I’ve only skied briefly in the past. There is an incredible amount of terrain, but it’s no joke. Twenty foot cliffs are marked with tiny little signs. They aren’t roped off because people actually enjoy hucking backflips off those cliffs. I say it was a good day to explore because without any fresh snow for a while, there were plenty of tracks to follow. It was clear where the main ski routes were and if there were no tracks then it was definitely a place that I didn’t want to go. I’ve got a few of the routes memorized now so that when that first powder day does come, I can hit some great runs without worrying about where I’m going to end up.

When I left, I was amazed at how many cars were in the lots and happy that I never waited more than 3 minutes for a lift all day. A common complaint about Crystal is that the lines are too long. I don’t know what those people are smoking or maybe they’re talking about the bunny slope. Either way, I don’t correct them. I just say, “Yep, it’s too busy, too flat, and it never snows." It’s their loss.

The first photo below is Paradise Bowl. There are two people just below the cliffs on the left but they are hard to make out in this small image. The second is Morning Glory Bowl. It was snowing lightly and there were no fresh boot tracks on the hike out there so I know that I was the only skier as far as you can see in this photo. Not too shabby for the busiest day of the year!

This year our company rolled out a new benefit. If you don’t get the free gym membership, you can get $800 towards sporting equipment. When I read that line it took me about seven milliseconds to realize that I was getting some new skis! the only catch is that the purchase had to be made in 2013 and this is the worst time of the year to buy skis. Last year’s stuff is sold out and this year’s models are still full price. Oh well.

My last set of skis were the 2007 Rossignol Bandit B2’s 182cm. I bought them because they were so fat compared to my first set of skis that I bought out in Jersey. After a year or two I realized that they weren’t nearly fat enough for the type of snow we get out here. They were great skis and I’m keeping them around for hardpack groomer days, but I wanted something much wider with rocker technology.

After demoing skis at Crystal a couple weekends ago, I ended up deciding on the Blizzard Cochise. They felt incredible when I skied and they offered one of the longest versions of any brand: 193cm. I’m a huge guy so I need all the surface area I can get. My Bandits were 75mm at the waist of the ski directly under my boot. These Cochises are 108mm! After I skied on them during the demo day, I looked them up online and learned that they have received a couple Ski of the Year awards so I guess the reviews back up my limited test.

It turns out that many of the local ski stores don’t carry the Blizzard line because they’re not one of the bigger brands, but I was able to find it at evo.com which is based in Seattle. The order was placed on New Years Day and by Thursday morning, they were sitting on my doorstep along with Marker Griffon bindings. I drove straight over to Gerk’s and they had the bindings mounted on the skis by the end of the day!

The new skis felt super light to me, but it turns out that’s a bit of an illusion. One Cochise with binding came in at 7.6 pounds on my scale and one Bandit with binding was 7.1. But considering how much more size the new skis have, they are clearly less dense.

This leaves me with three sets of skis. The one on the far left was a used set that I picked up at a ski swap for pretty cheap. I sold those recently to help pay for the new skis. I’ll keep the Bandits around for use in early season when the snow hasn’t quite covered all the rocks.

On Saturday I headed to Crystal for my fifth day of skiing so far this season. My watch keeps tracks of how many runs I take in a day and I’ve already done more than the last three years! And what a season it has been so far. The photo below shows the top of the Northway lift earlier this week. They had to dig 9 feet down to make a path for the chair. The snow this month has been incredible!

I arrived in the parking lot at 8:15 for the 9:00 opening and I was amazed at how many people were already there. In true Crystal fashion, the enormous parking lot crowds apparently got lost between their cars and the slopes because I never saw big lines. The gondola line was short so I hopped in that and was at the top a little before 9 thanks to an early opening. There wasn’t any fresh snow, but I do love a good groomer so I made about 5 laps on Green Valley waiting for the crowds to show up. They never did arrive, but I noticed that the Northway lift had opened so I decided to explore there.

I discovered a couple ENORMOUS areas that I’ve never skied before and look forward to checking out more in the future. It occurred to me that these new areas I found to ski were bigger than the entire resorts that I used to ski in the Philly area. Crystal had also run the snow cat up part of Northway which is very rare but thankfully it smoothed out the huge moguls that form right near the bottom of the lift.

On my way out of Northway, I decided to attempt the long traverse back to base called I-5. I must have made a wrong turn at some point because I ended up down at LOT E. That was super convenient though because I had forgotten my snacks and was able to grab them from the roof of my car as I caught a shuttle back up to the lodge. The parking lots were completely full by this point (even lot F was filling up) but I still never saw a long line.

The light was starting decrease up top as the day went on so I called it quits around 1:30. It was a fun day for all the new areas I found to ski, but the conditions were nothing to write home about.

Looking back at the history of skis, there are some obvious major advancements in technology. Early skis were slabs of wood that you would strap your feet to, but skiing really started to gain popularity with the masses when rigid plastic boots and break away bindings were introduced. In the mid-90’s, the skiing industry discovered shaped skis. This meant that the part of the ski under your foot was thinner than the ends. It greatly improved skiers ability to carve in turns, keeping the whole ski in contact with the snow in a big arc.

About ten years ago, the industry started another big shift. This time it was called “rocker.” The diagram below shows the older camber shape with the new rocker shape.

The goal of a rockered ski is to float on top of powder, but the problem was that the early models were horrible on groomed runs. The tips would flap around and there was hardly any edge contacting the snow when you attempted to carve. Modern rocker skis are a combination between the older camber and the newer rocker. Here’s a side profile of the 2013 Salomon Rocker 2 108.

This might look roughly like the camber diagram, but the major differences from cambered skis are that these new rocker skis are much flatter under foot and the rise to the tips starts early. It’s not a “fully rockered” ski since those are best kept for pure powder skiing which very few of us do. I’ve been reading about rocker in magazines for a long time, but it has finally gotten to the point where I felt like it had potential to be an all-mountain ski. Conveniently I’m in the market for some new skis this season.

This last weekend I demoed a couple pairs of skis at Crystal to figure out what I might like. I’ve never skied a rockered ski or even a ski as fat as modern skis so I wanted to try them before plunking down that much cash. Based on my research I started with the  Salomon Rocker 2 108s. They are 108mm underfoot (my current skis are 79mm) and they have rockered tips. The morning was cold and blustery with hard packed bumps off piste. I theorized that any new ski would be better in the powder  than my old skis so I wanted to test the rocker on groomers. I was immediately impressed. They weren’t quite as good as my Bandit B2’s on the hard groomers, but they were plenty good. And as fresh snow started to fall, I ventured off the groomers and fell in love with the skis. They handled every condition I could find with an ease I had never experienced. They were so much fun that I had a hard time going back to the demo shop to switch them out for something else.

I asked the sales guy what he recommended and he pointed me to the Blizzard Cochise. The measurements are similar to the Salomons, and I didn’t notice a ton of difference on the groomers. But as good as the Salomons were off-piste, the Blizzards were even better! I was doing things with those skis that I had never done before. It felt like in 30 minutes I gained more skill than I’ve gained in the last year. The snow was falling pretty fast and I found some powder stashes to play in. I’ve always been frustrated with powder in the past because I couldn’t ski it like I knew I should be able to, but with these skis it was a breeze. The groomers had collected a lot of snow and there were large bumps of packed powder. With my old skis, I had to ski around and  between them, but with these new skis, I was able to pick my own line regardless of the bumps and just skim over the top. It’s something I’ve watched other people do and had no idea how the physics of it worked. Now that I had the same skis, it all made sense.

As you can probably tell, it’s hard to describe the feeling and how much I felt like it elevated my skiing. The best description I’ve come up with so far is that it’s like a baseball player who has been using a wood bat all his life and switches to aluminum. You can use it the same way but you get a big difference in the result, and then as you get better with it, you realize there are additional capabilities. I’m by no means an expert and I have a lot to learn, but these new skis could give me the confidence and tools to increase the rate at which I improve. I’m going to sit on it a couple more weeks and then make my decision right after New Year. I can’t wait!

On Saturday I headed to Crystal again. They have gotten a lot of snow since last weekend and the base area really showed it. I could ski all the way to the bottom without much trouble. I didn’t need the rock skis today!

The day started with a great run off of High Campbell and then I spent much of the rest of the time exploring the Green Valley lift. I’ve skied at Crystal more than any other resort and still more than half of my runs were runs that I had never done before. It was a lot of fun exploring.

I did whip out the GoPro for a few runs, but I didn’t leave it on my helmet the whole time. The assumption seems to be that if you have a camera on your head, you think you’re awesome. I could spend all day telling you why I’m not awesome, but still, I’d rather let people laugh in silence at my skiing. (I regularly hear jests shouted from chairlifts to people who fall wearing a GoPro.) Anyway, I got some decent video of one run and have posted it to YouTube so you can watch. It occurred to me that much of the video is going to look extremely similar so I probably won’t post a ton of it going forward. I have a lot of fun with the camera though!

Steven Pass was probably the place to ski today though. They got 2 feet of snow on Thursday night and 4 feet last night for a total of 69” at the base. They had to spend quite a lot of time digging some of the lift chairs out of the snow! Apparently the lines were incredibly long though so I wasn’t too disappointed. A good chunk of the Crystal crowd eats lunch between 11:30 and 1 and during that time, I repeatedly skied right onto the lift.

The day ended slightly early for me. I took a break around 1:30 and then rode the gondola back up to get a few more runs in. About three turns into my first run, I got cramps in both thighs. Thankfully one lightened up but my right leg was pretty rough. I made it the 2500 vertical feet back down to the base and headed for the car. It was a good day and there’s no reason to push it.