I have long had cambered skinny skis and a pleasant, easy-turning powder ski. I absolutely loved that powder ski, a pair of Fairweather Cathedrals, for what they are: damp, wide powder snarfflers (go talk to Graham, he really does make some amazing, beautiful skis). Skiing them has always felt like unstructured playtime. Any turn I want to make, whenever I want to make it, but with a flat enough tail to track through turns. The skis, like a golden retriever, never complained about how I skied them, no feedback ever apart from the unending stare from their beautiful topsheets. Turns could be unhurried. But that fun ends now. Mostly because I had the chance to ski a pair of Movement Alptracks 100s last spring in a surprise storm. Not that I loved the experience. The Alptracks, an extremely light, tight-radius, and cambered powder ski, battled mightily in variable spring powder covering wet-loose debris. They have a high-speed cadence, too. Each turn can only be so long before it’s time to crash or start the next one. It kind of feels like line dancing a beat behind the caller. But it got my mind going. What if powder skiing felt as engaging and responsive on big skis as it does on my toothpicks, without the added thrill that I just might drown in all that new snow? Would such a ski invariably feel like the high-paced death march of the Alptracks, especially in variable snow? Or could they feel like my beloved Fairweathers with a little back-talk, more cattle dog than dopey golden retriever?
So here we are. With some performance powder skis that are hopefully a neat compromise between the tweaker nonsense of the Alptracks and the unconditional love of my Fairweathers. They have another 1.5m to the radius compared to the Alptracks. And they’re somewhat perfectly in between the Alptracks and Fairweathers on weight (1200g, 1800g, and 1650g). I’m curious to see if that, along with the stability that weight brings, will be enough to slow down the pace of things without washing out into the lassitudes of unstructured skiing.
