This was our second consecutive test at Deer Valley, Utah, where the Green Coats groom by night with fine-tooth combs and paintbrushes made from unicorn hair, and the Empire Canyon Grill’s truffle oil flows like wine. Pow stashes truly last for days here, despite our cadre’s crushing assaults on the Daly Chutes and Lady Morgan trees, and the Empire Canyon zone gives us access to every terrain type on each run. Thank you, Deer Valley, for helping to make the magic happen once again.

27

Gallery

27 Images

To Our Sponsors: A HEARTY THANKS FOR YOUR GENEROUS CONTRIBUTIONS. FIST BUMPS ALL AROUND.

• CHAOS
• Fun and funky hats
• DAKINE
• Backpacks to haul it all
• DARN TOUGH
• Toasty warm socks
• GOAL ZERO
• Keeping our gadgets charged
• HELLY HANSEN
• Outerwear pretty enough for pictures
• HESTRA
• Warmest gloves out there
• THE INFINITE MONKEY THEOREM
• Grapes of the fermented variety
• PRET HELMETS
• Helmeting our noggins
• SKIDA
• Stylie neckwear
• STANLEY
• Waterbottles to keep us hydrated
• SWIX
• Poles, Norwegian style
• UNDER ARMOUR
• Just what we like next to our skin
• UNTAPPED
• Sugaring testers up with maple waffles
• UPSLOPE
• Where the beer’s at
• UVEX
• Perfecting our goggle tans

Phoning It In

There’s little that we editors like more than taking notes and writing about stuff. It’s what we do. This year we moved that process for our ski test onto our cell phones, working with our testers and software guru Centric to customize a cutting-edge PLM phone app to use in the fi eld when hammering skis. There were plenty of kinks: gloved fingers, cold phones, heart-pounding close calls of dropping our phones from lifts into the abyss below. But we got what we wanted: real data captured in real time, with thousands of comments from nearly two dozen opinionated testers. Through it all we learned one key lesson: Next time, invest in a waterproof phone case. Duh.