Like a benevolent despot, the new Kästle LX85 has power in its bloodlines but mercy in its heart. A look at its components suggests a ski with all the rigor of a race ski, with a vertically laminated wood core encased in glass and twin sheets of Titanal. The cap construction of the earlier LX’s has been replaced with the square sidewalls associated with more powerful skis. But its tip and tail are tapered to take the edge off their reactions and the forebody has the slight elevation that is considered essential on an off-trail ski.
One peek at the baseline of the Nordica Enforcer 93 tells you all you need to know about the ski’s terrain preferences: this is an off-piste utensil with an elevated snout that on hardpack looks like it could be sniffing for snow. If fed its preferred diet of crud, the shovel gets busy absorbing the sudden impacts of broken snow, more than making up for its uninvolvement on the groom. It more than holds it own on hardpack, popping off its cambered midsection as if it can’t wait to get to the next turn.
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.
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.
