I ended up renting a car for 1 day. UTA bus is cheap at $5 roundtrip but would take at least 2 extra hours from my day which I'd rather spend on the mountain. Without any kiddos in tow and on a weekday, I scooped 23,724FT vertical and 27.4 MI distance, chatted with many cheerful chair mates from the east coast (4 groups from NY, 1 from NH, 1 from MD, 1 from CT) that day.
Very satisfied :-)
I demoed(I'm glad you asked so that I can make a note for myself too):
FISHER RANGER 96 (158cm)
HEAD KORE 99 (162cm)
black crows camox birdie 9.7/18 (162.3cm)
I loved ALL of them. Much more stable and funner than my old 150cm beginner skis. However, being demoing for the first time, I couldn't really tell the subtle differences among them :-(
Came back home and skied with my old 150cm skis at Squaw yesterday after a fresh 2-4 inches of snow, I was surprised that I can still tolerate them :-) But I now believe that I could indeed ski much faster and more gracefully had I had the newer/longer skis. Well, I'm blissed to just being able to get on the mountain at this stage of my life.
Alta is running sale for the demos and the HEAD KORE was priced at $349 only. But I hope that I could demo Stöckli Stormrider, Blizzard BP and Santa Anas soon that was talked about in
the other thread. Then when I have the budget, I would know which one to take home :-)