The Intuition luxury liners I’m going to stick in the Maestrale RS for testing are 220g. The OE Scarpa Maestrale RS liner (custom made for them by Intuition) is 263g and is supposed to be beefier to match the beef of the boot. I’ll end with observations for you weight weenies. I then proceeded to disassemble the hardware (continuing the fine Wildsnow tradition of messing with perfectly good equipment) and found the fasteners to have liberal amounts of red Loctite. After the 10 days I went over them again and all was still locked down nicely. – Sizes are 24.5-32 for Maestrale RS, 22.5-27 for Gea RS (women’s version)Īs to how reliable the hardware fastening is on this boot, I checked all the threaded fasteners (fewer now, as mentioned above) before field testing and the hardware was tight. Interesting they’d make the buckles huge but not do much with beefing the tongue hinges. I’m not crazy about those little hinges as I’ve found them fragile and have broken them (replacement hinges are easily available from Scarpa). – Tongue hinges stronger than the ones on the first retail models of the Maestrale, but we feel they could be stronger. But beef can be good so we’ll let that one rest. Isn’t a buckle just a buckle? Or perhaps buckles stretch? The huge buckles definitely detract from the elegance of the old boot and probably add a bit of weight - we suspect they’re mostly for shelf appeal. – Buckles are beefier which I am told by Scarpa contributes to boot stiffness. I took the tongues off the Maestrale RS to compare with Maestrale and they’re interchangeable. – Tongue remains Pebax but is noticeably stiffer than the tongue from the old Maestrale. Yes, Spitfire LT is everything I look for in a spring ski – light, exceptionally quick and superior edge hold. The new early rise tip made all the difference in the world for me in the characteristic variability of spring Coast Mountains skiing (powder interspersed with crust, glace, ice, and bushwhack). I for one am glad G3 did mess with success. G3’s Spitfire LT adds an early rise tip to the older 2011 variant that ironically states in its G3 description that “you don’t mess with success”. To summarize my experience, you can think of the Maestrale RS as a stiffer, uglier version of the Maestrale with mounting hardware that isn’t problematic. You can review Wildsnow’s review of Maestrale here as well as the long term review. This is Scarpa’s best-selling ever alpine touring boot. Original Maestrale was wildly popular both for its Halloween pumpkin good looks (ha), performance, and for reasonable pricing (almost heretical in this very costly industry). The Maestrale RS is derived from Scarpa’s Maestrale alpine touring boot. Maestrale RS has already been previewed on Wildsnow here.

(Photos and video by Lee Lau unless otherwise noted.) I was on production versions of these products made available for testing and review.

So this also became a review of next season’s G3 Spitfire LT skis. While this is primarily a review of Scarpa’s new 2012/13 version Maestrale RS backcountry skiing boot, I paired the shoes with new planks from G3.

Scarpa maestrale rs fit