Skiiiiiiiiiing

[Aisling]

ok... i can't take it... i'm at work....3 people are yapping on and on about skiing, racing on skis, etc... my interjections fail to turn the conversation.

help!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Aisling]

actually i really don't mind... its just the conversation is making me want to go ride right now.

[Jonny]

You can always go after work, temps should be back down to about -12° F by 7pm. -16 in Lenox this morning, the 'roy was like chalk. :D

[Jack M]

what the sidecut radius of their skis are.

[Tommy D]

Ask them if they've experienced a real carve yet.

I used to race on my HS ski team, and I can carve a turn on skis very well, but the experience of carving a ski pales to that of carving a snowboard. (Although new ski designs are bringing this gap closer.)

[outsider]

tried a pair of my friend's Atomic supercross skies a few weeks ago, i havnt skied for 3 or 4 years, and never learned how to carve on skies, but to my surise i was carving decent turns in about 3 runs. Its way too easy! I have to say that from what i felt making my beginning carves i could tell that a full carve on skies could never match what i get on a snowboard

[Guest bookworm]

You're no traitor. Have often thought that it would be great to get back on skis - especially now, ten years later. The stability must be great, with your legs and feet independant. Though I imagine that having both locked in to my snowboard is what makes carving so powerful and exhilerating.:D

[AaronG]

Guys, I did just what you are talking about, after 7+ years of riding hard boots and after much ribbing from my older brother, I purchased a new pair of shaped skis this year. My brother kept harpin' on me about how the shaped skis rail the turns in comparison to the old straight skis. He said that you could lay down carves as well on the new skis that you can on a carving board. I had to try it for myself.

I went up to catch the early morning groom and decided to ride the carving stick in the morning and felt great, switched over to the carving sticks in the late am. I must say I was quite impressed with the edge hold, carving of the new skis. I will tell you now that you cannot lay out the carves on skis that you can on a carving board but you can look back up the hill and see your tracks coming down. I'm still learning the different techniques required for using the skis and it has been fun. I have over 8 days on the skis now and I'm not sure that I will ever give up on the alpine setup but I will be a switchover rider now. If you were an ex-racer like myself and wanted to try the new skis, I highly recommend them.

The mobility you have when on a pair of skis is great, no worrying about the flat area, just pole and skate. No sitting on your as* when talkin with your friends.

[Pat Donnelly]

and what length?

[AaronG]

Pat, I purchased some Head Cross Ti in a 185, I wanted to go longer but the guy kept insisting that you need to throw that old ski thinking out the window when it comes to length on the new stuff. On the old straight skis I was riding I skied anywhere between 205 for slalom and 215 for Super G. My next purchase is to buy new boots, cuz my Nordica 981 are just too stiff. You don't need the stiff boots anymore to weight the tips like you used to have to do with the straight skis.

The Head Cross Ti have a 116-67-98 profile: tip waist tail.

BTW, I'm 6'2" 195.

[Baka Dasai]

Originally posted by oldvolvosrule

you can look back up the hill and see your tracks coming down.

There's no doubt about that. There's a solid core of skiers at my local mountain who leave perfect sets of parallel trenches, and they do it at much higher speeds than I can carve on my board.

But they can't match the tightness of the turns I do, and they also don't seem to get the same amount of pop out of the turn that you can get with a snowboard. Most of their turns have a kind of "dead" look to them.

But for screamingly fast big carved turns, skis look ideal.

[Zone]

I'm one of those cross over. Started when I tried the Elan SCX, one of the earliest and most radical sidecuts back then. Then switched to plates. Now I ride plates when I'm on my own and use the shaped skis when with my kids (easier to control and drag them along) but still able to make deep trenches and high Gs. Esthetically, carving low on boards does look much nicer, more like carving a wave (monoski vs waterskiis).

[Ray(ottawa)]

If you really want to experience equivalent carving on skiis, you have to get more extreme with the equipment. Go to a soft world cup slalom ski with a 12m sidecut and a 165cm length. The bindings should be mounted on a riser plate that doesn't interfere with the ski flex curve. Finally, spend more than just a few hours on them learning how to make them work.

[Guest mphdemon]

BAKA I am already a switch over rider, actually a switch over skier. I carve most of the time now, and I'm not great but I'm pretty good. But I also have a pair of 176 solomon race ski's, those things freakin haul, but they are meant to. The reason that those skier's turns looked dead to you was probably because they were riding such stiff ski's. That would normaly mean that you would get more spring out of your turns, but most of the new ski's, racing ski's anyway, are so incredibly stiff that you can barely flex them in the first place so there won't be any recoil. There are ski's that you could do that with, but for the most part you don't find many good skiers that aren't or haven't been on a race team. So you only see them on unbelievably stiff ski's. If you put anyone of them on a different, softer pair then they would look a lot different. When it comes to how tight their turns are, that all depends on their flex and their length.

You also have a very good point, ski's were meant to go fast. That's just what most of them anyway were built for, but you can get ski's that will match just about anything a snowboard can do, unfortunately. That doesn't mean that you can get the same feeling, but you can do the same things. It is even possible for a skier to get as low as we can, just watch basically any recent Warren Miller movie.

[patmoore]

I split my time between a GS board (Volkl RennTiger) and 180 cm Atomic GS skis. This year I've been running GS courses on Atomic Slalom skis (only 160 cm). The edge control is astonishing and I've been able to lower my race times by a full second. If you haven't tried carving on short shaped skis, you might want to give it a try.