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You're Probably Skiing on the Wrong Skis. I Was.

Photo credit: Westend61 - Getty Images
Photo credit: Westend61 - Getty Images

From Popular Mechanics

I grew up in Alaska 15 miles from the base of a ski mountain in a small town where skiing wasn't so much a winter activity as it was a measure of social capital. Swap "skiing" for "in church" in that traditional Southern greeting, "We didn't see y'all in church Sunday, hope everything's all right," and you'll get an idea of the kind of place it was.

I loved skiing, but I started getting less of a thrill out of winter when, in 1993, a new kind of ski took over the downhill market. It was the Elan SCX, the world’s first production "shaped" ski. Then touted as revolutionary, shaped skis resembled an hourglass, and were shorter than their predecessors. Having broken a tip off the Dynastar Omesoft “straight skis” I’d loved since high school, I bought my first pair of Rossignol shaped skis in 1997.

The rationale seemed sound. Straight skis had almost no side cut. Turning them required an aggressive action, which was tough for beginners and fatiguing for everyone. Shaped skis-the SCX in Elan’s groundbreaker stood for “sidecut extreme”-fixed these problems.

I assumed the ballyhooed “parabolic” design would upgrade my skiing. It didn’t. For me, shaped skis proved inferior in every way-more sluggish on bumps, chattery on ice, slower everywhere.

Photo credit: Tetra Images/Noah Clayton - Getty Images
Photo credit: Tetra Images/Noah Clayton - Getty Images

In the mid-2000s, ski design changed again. “Fat skis”-wider, heavier, longer-came into fashion. In an effort to enhance flotation in soft snow and stability at speed, makers also integrated “rocker” or “reverse camber” designs, removing the traditional upward curve in the middle of the ski that provided pop and energy when carving a turn. With considerable enthusiasm, I ditched my disappointing shaped Rossies and jumped on the fatty bandwagon with Head and Dynastar skis.

That’s when I started getting sick of the whole endeavor. I’m six-two, two bills, but those big boards felt like they were skiing me. Yes, they were fast, but they turned like battleships, were about as flexible as an icicle and had me massaging my thighs in the lodge by noon.

The Snowboard Problem

According to Chris McKearin, Salomon Alpine Commercial Manager for North America, the barrage of new ski designs that ran from the mid-1990s until about 2010 “was 100 percent driven by snowboard influence.”

“Snowboarding was rising big time in the ‘90s and taking a big chunk out of skiing. Skiing was viewed as old and stale,” says Whistler, British Columbia-based ski legend Mike Douglas. “You could surf the snow, go fast in powder and do all these crazy jumps. My friends and I saw the energy snowboarding had, but we were skiers and we wanted a ski that let us do that stuff.”

The “godfather of freeskiing,” Douglas helped design the 1998 Salomon Teneighty, the world’s first twin-tip ski, which revolutionized off-trail skiing. New designs worked fine for big-time skiers, but in a rush to outdo each other, manufacturers went bananas.

“It was an evolutionary thing, you couldn’t go wide enough,” Douglas says. “It was absurd, you could put two skis together and it was like a snowboard.”

The Most Underrated Ski Style: Mogul Skis

Photo credit: Dustin Satloff - Getty Images
Photo credit: Dustin Satloff - Getty Images

By 2017, “absurd” summed up my feeling about every new ski I’d tried for two decades. Missing the easy float and savage carving ability of my old Omesofts, I started cruising yard sales and websites looking for a pair of vintage boards. That’s when I stumbled upon the best skis I’ve ever owned-a new pair of Dynastar Twister mogul skis.

At the time, I wasn’t even aware there was such a thing as “mogul skis.” I just liked the Twister’s design. Straight, narrow, long, flexible. I did some research, took a chance and sent off $550 to a site called mogulskiing.net.

Getting on those mogul skis felt like turning on a smart phone for the first time. Fast. Reactive. Magical. The moment the very idea of a turn entered my mind the skis seemed to pivot for me. They required almost no work at all.

Marketing literature around mogul skis-ID One, Hart and Rossignol also make them-emphasizes quick turns and dynamic responsiveness. Experts say these attributes come at the sacrifice of speed, stability and floatation, but I haven’t found this to be the case. From the Canadian coast to the Colorado Rockies, I’ve more than kept up with my buddies on their fat, rocker and shaped skis. No matter the conditions or terrain, “specialized” mogul skis are all-mountain champs.

The Importance of "Waist-Width"

The main difference between mogul and other skis is what makers call waist-width, the narrowest part of the ski just beneath the boot. The most popular skis for men in the United States have a waist-width between 95-100 millimeters. On the most popular women’s skis it’s 85-90 millimeters. Plenty of skis have waist-widths as high as 110 millimeters and dedicated powder skis as much as 120 millimeters. My Twisters measure just 66 millimeters underfoot.

Photo credit: Mechanicsofsport.com
Photo credit: Mechanicsofsport.com

Waist-width affects three primary functions. Wider width determine flotation and stability at speed, especially in powder and soft snow. And along with the ski tip, waist-width determines what’s called “turn initiation,” how fast a ski digs into a turn. Maybe most importantly, it affects the angle and force of torsion on the outside of the foot during a turn.

“If you’re making a lot of turns on a fat ski, it torques your knees in a way that’s not very comfortable,” says Douglas. “That’s why ski width got dialed back a little when they got really fat. Your knees would get really tired.”

The narrower the ski, the easier it is on your knees. The fatter the ski, the more control and stability it provides. The key for manufacturers is striking a balance that will appeal to the broadest base of consumers. “Mid-fat” is the term used to describe the current phase of the most popular skis.

A former high school ski coach I know explains the result this way: “The new skis are like oversized golf clubs. They forgive the user’s mistakes more and allow someone who can’t ride the center of the ski to feel like they can.”

How Skis Have Changed the Way We Ski

“Before the parabolic phenomenon of the mid-‘90s, people were initiating turns by getting very forward on a ski,” says McKearin. “This shifted to being able to roll a ski on its edge and feel that side-cut engage. The strategy of executing a carved turn shifted dramatically because of that shape.” Similarly, fatter skis require more leg separation than the narrower skis of yore, when good turning form meant keeping skis and knees together as one integrated unit.

“Probably the reason you like mogul skis so much is because, like me, you're old!” Chris Moore, owner of mogulskiing.net, wrote me. “Old” in the ski universe means anyone who learned to ski before about 1995. “It's easier for people like us to apply the technique we grew up developing on Twisters because they more closely resemble the skis we grew up skiing than modern shaped/rockered skis do. I struggled with it a lot but once it clicked I could see that it’s almost a joke how easy the modern skis are to ski. That said I still like my Twisters for anything requiring tight rapid-fire turns (moguls, trees), and as a bonus I think they carve GS turns pretty nicely on the run out to the lift.”

It might be because I learned on comparatively narrow skis I simply prefer that style. But I’m not so sure others wouldn’t benefit from a return to golden form.

At a recent event in Alta, Utah, McKearin, who’s 36 and owns a collection of vintage skis, pulled out a pair of mid-‘90s Salomon Super Force 9s, an iconic straight ski considered a precursor to today’s freeride boards.

“I was blown away by how fun they were, but it was a really light powder day,” he says.

In an effort to return a sense of enjoyment to the sport and implying that “actual skiing” is dying, perhaps as a result of over-design, pro Blizzard skier Marcus Caston dedicated his riotous 2018 “Return of the Turn” video series to straight skis, moguls and trick moves average skiers could pull off. His mock recreation of a 1992 ski film, using all period equipment, is a time-warp masterpiece that makes explicit points about slavish commitment to contemporary styles.

Still, Douglas, a former competitive mogul skier himself, finds my devotion to mogul skis bizarre. And rare.

“If you look at it from an objective point of view you have to look at sales,” he says. “Mogul skis are the only straight skis you’ll find anywhere in the world. Nobody sells them, most are direct order.”

In fact, mogul skis are such a niche product it appears no one tracks their overall sales. McKearin says far fewer than 3,000 pairs might be sold in a given year, and almost all of these to competition skiers. “I can say mogul ski sales represent a tiny fraction of a fraction of a percent of global ski sales,” he says.

Wherever I go, my Twisters draw incredulous glances, skeptical remarks and occasional insulting jibes from lift operators, season ticket holders, ski patrollers and other members of the ski bum cognoscenti. I draw solace knowing even the world’s best face the same ridicule.

“You’re standing in a lift line and people are laughing at you, like: 'What are those? What kind of like goofy, dress-up day is this?'” Caston says in a “Return of the Turn” defense of his narrow, straight boards. “You’re like, well, what are those like little short, fat things you got there?”

Instead of shredding their skis-an exercise better left to the pros-I tell the doubters the same thing: Mogul skis made skiing fun for me again. As far as I’m concerned, I’m on the edge of the next revolution in ski design. I’m just waiting for everyone else to make the turn.

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