The Blizzard Black Pearl and Völkl Kenja have company at the top tier of women’s models, the new Santa Ana 93 from Nordica. The springboard that launched the Santa Ana 93 into this elite company is a new construction built around a poplar/beech/ balsa core with a center channel of foam. Sandwiching the new wood core are laminates of prepreg carbon, a significant weight savings over glass, and .4mm sheets of tip-to-tail Titanal, in essence re-investing the weight savings in a power account.
The Navigator 90 borrows the Enforcer tip radius, but substantially shortens the distance from the widest point in the shovel to the forward contact point. In other words, the Navigator is designed to stay more connected to the snow, improving its Frontside performance. Both models are cambered underfoot, but the Navigator uses a square tail that’s turned up only at the very end. This creates a more solid and responsive platform along the full length of the ski.
One way to make a fundamentally strong construction more docile is to rocker it, which reduces the amount of ski that operates on hardpack conditions. Because the ski tip and tail bend away from the snow surface, for there to be ski/snow contact in these areas the snow must rise up to meet them. This makes a ski like the Kästle FX85 HP feel more at home in a patch of day-old crud than it does on an acre of crystal carpet.
While the QST 92 isn’t daunted by firm snow, flat terrain isn’t its native habitat. It’s most at home in about of foot of new, or at least recent, snow, where its tapered tip and double rockered baseline do their best work. As I mentioned in last year’s review, that it’s as light as a salad for lunch makes the QST 92 all the easier to toss around in tight quarters like trees and chutes.
For 2018 Rossi gave the Temptation 88 the HD treatment, adding its Carbon Alloy Matrix – a weave of carbon, glass and basalt – to the ski, bringing it up to par with its unisex wingman, the Experience 88 HD. This means the new Temptation 88 HD has more bite on hard snow, more energy off the edge and more stability at speed than its earlier incarnation. As was the case with the Experience 88, the HD upgrade raised the performance range of the Temptation 88 by several notches.
