TECH TALK
Long live the revolution
Freeride skis have come a long way
in the past decade.
By George Koch
It was buttery smooth, exhilaratingly
fast and dumbfoundingly easy. It
liberated me to ski harmonically
with the contours of the terrain. My route
meandered whimsically where before it would
have been a regimented fall line. Trees and
rocks became a new dimension of intrigue. That
it was a picture-perfect March afternoon of
dazzling Alberta sunshine and settled powder - and set in a remote couloir to boot - sure
didn't hurt. Still, it was clear something more
was at work. Skiing was transformed. It was a
breakthrough - breathtaking and a bit scary.
Skiing would never be the same. It was just
over a decade ago, my introduction to the
freeride ski (and skiing) revolution.
Freeride skis changed the skiing of every
higher-end skier now. They made powder
snow and off-piste terrain accessible to many
thousands of others. Their much higher natural
skiing speeds placed a premium on long pitches
and big vertical, and the larger turns most
skiers began making demanded wider slopes.
They thereby changed people's evaluation
of terrain and their ranking of ski areas. The
term may seem gimmicky and after 10 years
even cliché. But it’s tailor-made. Freeride skis
have been genuinely liberating and, therefore,
revolutionary. Because all revolutions are
innately dangerous, reeride skis have had
unforeseen effects. Gratifyingly for skiers, they
reversed the ascendancy of snowboarding, as
I noted in Ski Canada a few years back (“Does
size matter?”, Winter 2006).
Off-piste skiing was a barrier fraught with dangers
Freeride skis directly altered how we ski,
physically, and all their benefits flowed from there. They erased the need for the up-and-down, hop-turn-driven approach that had long
dominated, in which one physically forces the
turn by first unweighting, then making the skis
come round. Hop-turning demands an even
rhythm. Every turn becomes nearly identical
and, therefore, straight fall line is virtually
mandatory and an even pitch preferred. The
particular combination of the skier's style and
weight, the length of his skis, the gradient
of the slope and the snow conditions yield
one optimal (and always slow) speed. It was
effectively impossible to ski fast off the pistes.
One’s only controllable variable was bobbing
frequency. Breakable crust as arduous, chalky snow rritating and heavy wet snow near-
impossible. layered powder challenged all but
pinnacle skiers, and even the greatest powder
became harder as one aged. Off-piste skiing
was a barrier fraught with dangers, anxieties
and misconceptions that most skiers never
surmounted.
The new approach centred on moving the skis
far out to the side, achieving the turn by riding
whatever surface was encountered while making
only subtle adjustments of pressure, angulation,
steering and speed. Smooth, supple, fast - and
immensely enjoyable. Freeride, indeed.
Was it a revolution that almost didn't
happen? Two precursors - ultra-wide short
skis for heli/snowcat skiing and “shaped” or “parabolic” skis for carving - each delivered
major advantages, but in an exaggerated form
and with glaring drawbacks obscuring their
potentially revolutionary significance. Their
marketing increased the conceptual murk. Both
were sold as instant, effortless solutions for the
inept rather than as tools that on the right feet
would make skiing better, faster, more graceful,
more varied and freer.
The initial fat skis of the early '90s enabled most to ski powder
Stiff, short and so wide they required
laterally offset bindings, the initial fat skis
of the early ’90s enabled nearly anyone to
make it from heli-drop to the pickup without
dislocating all his or her lower joints in
successive cartwheeling tumbles. But they were
dreadful to actually ski on - so ungainly they
forced a smear-turn effect that rendered skiing
utterly artless. A backward leap. Despite heavy
promotion, guides and advanced skiers derided
them as old-men's skis and made a great show
of rejecting them. Nor did they ever catch on at
ski hills.
Parabolic skis had less ruinous start- instructors and racers soon came to love
them, and their startling shortness appealed
to novices and intermediates terrified of 205s.
But they were horrific off-piste. Their shortness
held obvious problems of missing surface area.
They'd find any underlying hard base, making
the actual powder moot. Their wild sidecut made
them annoyingly hooky on steep, hard slopes.
And their narrow waists caused the underfoot
area to punch through any layers in soft now,
bogging you down if not launching you over
your tips.
You gotta get out and try some of these new Rossi Bandits
When real freeride skis showed up, many
advanced skiers were initially skeptical if not
resistant. The message - that these weren't
another gimmick for dilettantes, but serious
weapons that could liberate serious skiers
from the old constraints - was initially lost.
Their relative shortness - 190, 180 or even 170
was standard, vs. 200-210 cm for the GS skis
normally used off-piste - seemed suspiciously
unmanly. Back in the late 90s, when an
American ski industry friend yelled at me over
the phone, "Ya gotta get out and try some of
these new Rossi Bandits," I dismissed it as
California psychobabble.
Many of us learned the hard way. In my case,
grappling with four feet of layered powder that
descended on Champéry, Switzerland, in a fierce
three-day blow. In the old days, we’d have all
simply struggled together, hop-turning extra
hard for a few arduous runs before retiring,
exhausted, to the mountain hut to await a break
in he weather and the snow's settlement into
a more congenial consistency. This time, most
of the group still did exactly that. But a couple
kept mysteriously gliding past us, floating
without apparent effort, never bogging down,
showing up at the lift grinning and ready for
more. They were on new-style wider skis. I was
won over. The breakthrough day mentioned at
the start came about a month later. Since then
I’ve owned perhaps 5 pairs of skis - and not
a race ski among them.
Freeride skis overcame or bypassed nearly
every limitation of traditional "pencil" skis.
They married the positives and thereby erased
the negatives of the two earlier attempts
to move beyond narrow skis. At the risk of
offending some ski company reps, I must note
three skis crucial to popularizing freeride as the
millennium turned: the Rossignol Bandit (X,
XX and XXX), the Salomon X-Scream and the
Atomic Betaride series (Volant Chubbs lent an
able hand, as did the Völkl Ranger - later the "G"- series). They elevated an innovation to a
revolution.
The breakthrough unleashed a profusion of variants
The breakthrough unleashed a profusion
of variants, refinements and envelope-pushing exaggerations,plus novelties and
tangents. Dozens and arguably hundreds
of great skiing models. As skiers explored,
experimented and competed (the new skis
birthed a new competition genre as well),
freeride’s parameters were pushed continually
outward - more speed, bigger hucks, steeper
slopes, longer fall lines, more and more
varieties of previously marginal snow.
Chronicling evolving design parameters
could fill a magazine, but one is highly
illustrative: waist width. Later-era GS skis
were approximately 66 mm underfoot. Initially
a freeride or "mid-fat" was perhaps 76 mm
and a truly wide ski 85-90. Nowadays 85
mm is considered narrow, and there are 96-
mm skis that carve a superb hard-snow turn.
Meanwhile the terminal-velocity, Alaska-conquering weapons have grown to 130 mm
or even greater underfoot while featuring a
double-sidecut and either full reverse camber
or an "early-rise" tip trailing a "conventional" freeride platform. In total, virtually everything
in ski design once considered settled has been
upended.
Millions have been liberated from the narrow-ski era
The freeride revolution's shockwaves
continue to reverberate. Some aspects went too
far - like shortness. Ski length has crept back
up and some skiers now proudly wave around
198-cm monsters, which in turn is clearly too
much for most skiers to handle. Some skiers
misapply the lessons or misuse the tools. Some
skis are too specialized, or are built for one
thing while being marketed for another. On
balance, however, millions have been liberated
from the strictures of the narrow-ski era and
thousands more ski powder than a decade back.
Today there's a ski out there perfectly matched
to any skier of any style, age and combination
of skiing tastes. The hardest part is picking it
out of the lineup.
Photo: Dan Carr