Hi Rusty - what I described. I'm sure most on epic wouldn't like this either. But the exact same description was given to me from both the PSIA III cert doing demos at snowcrest on a ski deck just back from some national PSIA event where these ideas were being presented - and the gal and her friend (the retired park city ski school director) on the afternoon skiing at Park city.
They described these attributes: (and the guy on the ski deck demonstrated them)
Feet shoulder or even further appart, knee pointing to create edging, CM staying between the feet.
Total ugly.
PSIA has lots of people teaching lots of different directions, but this particullar style that I see a lot of people doing on the hills seems to be someone's faux understanding or implementation of what they think racers are doing. This was the PSIA III cert's explaination of where the inspiration for these techniques were coming from.
To encourage the wide stance the gal at the Park City lesson was told to imagine a basketball or beach ball between her knees. Both of these gals had been to Lito camps in the past and had a functional stance - like Von Grunigen has suggested - where the legs dangle out of their sockects - there is your stance. They skied with balance tipping the inside foot while removing pressure from they old outside foot while tipping it to release the old turn and create the new turn. Very smooth skiers. The gal had seriously tried the new approach and hated it. She said it hurt her knees and she felt very unstable skiing that way. The retired park city school director had told her nothing wrong with skiing the same way she had been doing and not to worry about it. She knew I had had lots of lessons from NW PSIA tech team and HH and one with Clendenon and wondered what I thought about they new wide stance thing and I told her what I said here. Misunderstood Faux race style skiing. I suggested she just follow her friend/retired ski school director's advice.
Are you going to be at Winterpark this year? When does Winterpark open up? I'll be at the Nov Instructor camp at copper again, and I like a warm up day before camp starts. It'd be fun to ski with you finally (instead of 10 sec then being on oppisite parts of laps the rest of the time). I bet you'd enjoy the Instructor camp. I'm sure you'd feel welcomed there. Most of the attendees are PSIA certs/examiners/etc. You can pick any combo of clinics so it's a camp that you can tailor it to your interests. They are doing V1 ski software analysis again, skier improvement, on-slope alignment analysis, eliminating the wedge - those are 4 I remember, but there are are more categories than that. Check it out at
http://www.pmts.org if your interested. Great value for the money. Diana on the V1 software is brutal though. But, you'll get a clear picture of the most important thing to work on to improve in that session.
Last year the WC skiers were skiiing in the AM before the slopes opened for general use. That's fun to watch too. (and they all seemed to know HH quite well and the coaches as they'd all be kibitzing and talking each morning as we came in)