Salomon

X-Drive 8.8 FS Ski

Frontside ninjas love a ski that can carve like it's on rails, but that doesn't mean they want to give up off-piste performance entirely. Enter the Salomon X-Drive 8.8 FS Ski, a grip-it-and-rip-it carving ski with a bit of an adventurous all-mountain streak. It's built on a ridiculously versatile 88mm waist, so you'll have enough of a platform for some occasional boot-top powder and crud while maintaining the edge-to-edge quickness you want in a carving ski, and it's All-Terrain Rocker 2.0 combines traditional camber with a moderately rockered tip to give you nimbleness in soft snow and tons of edge contact when it's time to lay your skis over and go. The tip also uses Salomon's Honeycomb technology, which reduces vibration and gives you a smooth ride in choppy conditions.

If you're going to be stacking up the G forces, your ski better have a solid backbone. Salomon threw a whole bunch of tech at the X-Drive to make it strong, powerful, and torsionally stiff, starting with the classic sidewall construction and energetic poplar core that's overlaid with a burly sheet of Titanal. Next, it added carbon X-Chassis reinforcements over the core to keep the X-Drive stiff under torsion and steer power to the edges, before integrating a composite-fiber RKS rocker stabilization technology at the tip for powerful, consistent turn initiation. All of this gives the X-Drive the ability to charge as hard as you want it to while still handling soft snow like a softer, less aggressive ski. That's a winner.