What about once you get off the artificial piste and onto Mother Nature’s natural surface? Luckily the ski gods smiled on me with a quick one day trip to Targhee where the early season conditions were faring much better. The next day I put a heel lift in under the liner and all of a sudden I was in the driver’s seat: power, agility, responsiveness with a nice progressive flex all rolled into one.īut early season in Aspen meant being relegated to man made snow and groomers only. At first the stiffness was unnerving for my 128 pounds. Forget the a-frame and knee angulation because these babies reward parallel legs, lateral motion and hip angulation. Right off, compared to other AT boots I’ve owned I noticed I was in a stiffer boot that begs for modern ski technique. My first day of skiing this season was also my first day on the RS. I went all-in with new boots this year when I sold all of my last season’s boots at the local swaps this fall. But try and short change the process and you will just frustrate yourself with pinched fingers and too much time penalty. After a few days the magic sequence becomes second nature and only a minor inconvenience. It requires a very specific sequence of events which when employed makes it easy to slide in and out. That said, the side hinged tongue does make getting in and out of the boot a bit more difficult than some boots. Obviously Scarpa feels this adds to the performance of the boot and all evidence seems to support their theory (idea being that the lower part of the tongue is solidly anchored to the boot shoe, rather than floating in a small tab at the toe). Scarpa RS employs the unique axial hinged tongue design that defines the Maestrale series. (9523 touring boot standard, not alpine, simply meaning it’s not a short trimmed sole and will function in a binding such as a Fritschi Diamir.) Plus, due to a standard DIN sole you have the freedom to choose between tech or frame bindings per your whim on any given day. With RS this is all wrapped in to one neat 7lb. Between better materials and engineering, downhill performance once reserved for those heavy boots is now combined with superb cuff mobility in touring mode. It wasn’t all that long ago that to achieve the kind of ski performance offered by the RS you had to strap on eight to ten pounds of beef and forego significant cuff articulation. Yep, for those of us in the trenches, who work cat, heli or patrol and recreate on tours long and short, sidecountry, hike to terrain in bounds, ride lifts and want the best weight-to-performance ratio, the Maestrale RS is in my opinion the shoe of choice. So far the Scarpa Maestrale RS has become the go-to boot I grab as I head out the door. Yet despite the confusion of white, one shoe has stood out. You’d think the the manufacturers must have all used the same bin of plastic pellets to make their boots (perhaps they did, it’s Montebelluna after all). I can’t seem to swing a dead cat with out hitting white these days, both in the form of snow that is finally coming our way in Colorado, and all of the white boots I’m surrounded by. Bob's Maestrale RS with an add-in wrap liner from Intuition.
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