Salomon Sends the XT-6 Back to the Underbrush With Lunar Rock and Deep Lichen Green

A new colorway of Salomon’s trail-born icon lands in Japan on August 5, trading its usual neutrals for a mossy, forest-floor palette.

Salomon is rel a new take on its XT-6, styled Lunar Rock, Deep Lichen Green and Bright Chartreuse under the reference L49306500, with a Japan market release date of August 5. The upper leans on a muted stone gray base, the kind Salomon calls Lunar Rock across its catalog, offset by a deep, mossy green that runs through the overlays and lace pocket. Bright Chartreuse shows up in small, sharp doses, on the eyelets and heel branding, the sort of detail that reads as a flash of new growth against bark and stone rather than a loud accent color.

It is not a radical departure. Salomon has built entire seasons of the XT-6 around exactly this kind of tonal, earth-drawn palette, and this release sits comfortably in that tradition rather than breaking from it. What makes it notable is timing and restraint: a shoe this closely tied to actual trail terrain arriving in a shade story that looks like it was picked up off a hiking path, at a moment when the broader Salomon lineup has been leaning increasingly urban.

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Underneath the new finish, this pair runs the same architecture that has carried the XT-6 since its most recent Sportstyle-era updates. Salomon’s own product listing for the L49306500 style describes the agileCHASSIS system working with the EnergyCell midsole for stability and dampening, a molded OrthoLite sockliner shaped to the contours of the foot, and a Mud contaGRIP outsole built with deep, sharp lugs for grip on loose or uneven ground. The Quicklace system remains, tucked into its small storage pocket on the tongue, alongside the sensiFIT cradle that wraps the midfoot.

None of that is new to this rel specifically. It is the same technical package that has made the silhouette a functional hiking shoe as much as a street one, lighter and more flexible than a traditional boot while still built for rough terrain. What the Lunar Rock and Deep Lichen Green colorway does is repackage that same chassis in a finish that visually reconnects the shoe to the ground it was originally engineered for.

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The XT-6 was first developed by Salomon’s S/LAB team in 2013, built for elite ultra distance runners covering fifty or more miles at a stretch over serious elevation, athletes like Kilian Jornet and Francois D’haene were among the runners the shoe was designed around. It was reissued in 2018 under Salomon’s Sportstyle range, and that move is generally treated as the real starting point of its life outside competitive trail running. Once it landed in Sportstyle, the shoe’s technical, slightly unfinished looking overlays and aggressive tread started showing up on editorial sets and runway styling rather than just mountain trails.

Gear Patrol’s reporting on the shoe traces a good chunk of that shift to New York specifically, with people noticing more XT-6s moving through Soho in the years following its Sportstyle relaunch, ahead of the broader connection run that followed with names like Kith, Palace and JJJJound. By the time GQ named it a shoe of the year in 2019, the XT-6 had effectively left the starting line of any actual trail race behind. It has stayed there since, with Salomon’s own site now filing the model under Sportstyle rather than show running.

A single Salomon XT-6 Soft Ground is showcased in a dramatic alpine setting, highlight its rugged outsole, Quicklace system, and high-visibility lime midsole against rain-soaked rock formations.

Inside Salomon, the shift has been described less as a marketing pivot than something closer to an accident of taste. In interviews the brand has given about the shoe’s own history, product staff who were teenagers during the XT-6’s original trail running years now count it among their most worn office footwear, a small detail that says something about how thoroughly the shoe moved from a specialist tool to a default choice. Salomon’s Sportstyle business has grown fast enough behind the XT-6 specifically that the company has pointed to the shoe as one of the main drivers of that unit’s expansion, with the silhouette regularly cited as the brand’s best selling style on the resale market StockX, where it accounts for a large share of all Salomon trades on the platform.

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Salomon currently lists the XT-6 in more than a dozen colorways at once, spanning quiet neutrals like Pearl Blue/Grisaille/Vanilla Ice through to bolder pairings, with Lunar Rock/Deep Lichen Green/Bright Chartreuse listed among the current unisex lineup on Salomon’s own site. Retail listings for the style put the price at 185 US dollars, in line with where the model has sat for several seasons now. A Japan market release notice puts the August 5 date specifically to that region; no separate confirmation of a matching US or EU release date for this exact colorway had gone up on Salomon’s regional storefronts at time of writing, and that gap is worth stating plainly rather than assuming a simultaneous global drop.

The shoe arrives roughly two years after Salomon marked the XT-6’s tenth anniversary with a crimson, one note colorway carrying S/LAB branding on the heel, a callback to its 2013 origins. Lunar Rock and Deep Lichen Green sits at the opposite end of that spectrum: shh, more literal about where the shoe came from, and closer in spirit to the terrain it was built to survive than to any anniversary campaign.