J Skis The Escalator

JASON LEVINTHAL HAS BEEN MAKING J SKIS FOR THE PAST DECADE, all in the name of downhill fun. The Friend, for instance, is a hard-charging powder plank while The Allplay is a park rat’s dream—and those are just two of the award-winning skis in the J lineup. The all-new J Skis The Escalator, however, is built to be easy to maneuver and lightweight on the uphill while staying true to Levinthal’s signature quality on the way down.

“What we’re doing right now is making more uphill-friendly skis that still rip on the downhill—The Escalator does exactly that,” said J Skis Engineer and Team Athlete Giray Dadali. “This ski really expands our lineup at 102-mm underfoot. It’s a ski you could go out and ride every single day. It’s going to perform really well on groomers, in skied-out trees, it’s going to float in powder, and it’s light enough for touring.”

J Skis The Escalator features a full aspen core with a maple mounting block and carbon fiber stringers that keep weight down while maintaining the pop and energy that J is renowned for. It has less early rise than J’s wider skis but boasts a thick shovel to ensure flotation. The J skis designers also opted for a more aggressive sidecut, so you can really feel the Gs when carving, but are still able to schmear turns when you want to scrub speed.

“It definitely has that J recipe in it where you can butter it, you can trick it around the hill, but I think the edge-to-edge performance of the ski surpasses anything we’ve made in the past,” Dadali said. “It’s going to be a bell-to-bell cruiser just by reducing that weight but still maintaining the energy, fun and pop in the ski. You’re going to be able to crush this thing an extra 50-percent of the day—it’s that much lighter.”

The weight savings go beyond the core construction, too. J used Quasi Isotropic fiberglass that’s 20-percent lighter than standard fiberglass in the core and reduced the thickness of the edges and bases of the ski to easily shave grams without sacrificing performance. Just ask Dadali who now reaches for The Escalator more than any other ski when riding in Utah’s Little Cottonwood Canyon. “The reliability of this ski, the nimbleness, the energy— that’s where this Escalator just blew me away,” Dadali said. “It’s exactly the way that I want to ride around the mountain, and I’ve been craving a ski like this for a long time.”

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