“Excellent carvability!” exclaims Sturtevant’s of Sun Valley’s Olin Glenne. “Solid feel, yet quick and very precise,” Glenne added, ranking the Pro Mountain 86 Ti his favorite all-mountain ski for Frontside conditions. Greg Whitehouse, the affable owner of California Ski Company also declared his love for this Fischer, calling it, “very solid and smooth as silk for high speed cruising in a variety of terrains.” Noting that its interest in short, slow turns was also of short duration, Whitehouse opines, “Hard to reel it in but if you don’t care to slow down, just hang on and grin!”
Much about the Monster line from Head is contrarian in nature: they want to engage early (the tips aren’t tapered), the tail holds onto a carve (they’re only rounded enough to avoid hang-ups), they use absurdly light materials but don’t obsess about overall weight, and every ski is built the same and priced the same despite wider skis having higher material costs.
Every Monster could also give a hoot about what’s it’s flying into. The Monster 88 would make a good ski for a Marvel™ Avenger: it’s not afraid of conflict. Aim it at snow with the consistency of fluff or foie gras; it could care less.
“Ridiculously easy to ski,” diagnoses Galena Gleason of Boot Doctors. It’s this quality that makes the OoolaLuv one to grow on. As the skier’s skills develop, the OoolaLuv will continue to provide succor and support. One quality the OoolaLuv doesn’t shared with Luvs of yore is its noticeable light weight. “Unbelievably light skiing with all the smoothness and stability you could want,” coos Shirley from Footloose, concluding, “it’s forgiving with a lot of performance.”
It’s tough being the offspring of a genius. Someone is always comparing you to Dad and it’s impossible to measure up. So it must be for the new MX89, taking its place in the Kästle line in the tracks of the MX88, indisputably one of the greatest skis ever made.
It’s not that the MX89 is a slacker; if anything, it might be an over-achiever, trying so hard to earn top grades for technical merit that its social skills suffer. There was an effortless quality to its predecessor associated with how quickly it tucked the skier into the turn; the slightly softer forebody of the MX89 doesn’t engage as aggressively, leaving it to the skier to seek a higher edge angle with a more aggressive move of his own. This phenomenon, we surmise, lies at the root of the new ski’s dip in Finesse scores compared to illustrious antecedent.
When Nordica opted to add an 85mm ski to its NRGY line of All-Mountain skis, they could have elected to downgrade the product to meet a lower price point. Blessedly for the skiing public, it elected to eschew this option, instead lowering the price without diluting the product. The NRGY 85 uses the same I-Core Torsion Bridge as its big brothers, the NRGY 90 and 100. But while the big boys are fairly rigid beams that take energy to deflect, the NRGY 85 is terrific at short turns, bowing readily into a slalom-radius arc tighter than you’d expect a 19.5m ski to engender.
