Back in the day, liveliness was a common trait among performance skis. With the advent of shaped skis, advanced technique involved maintaining snow contact through the end of the arc. Popping off the snow became a faux pas, rockered tips reared their ugly heads and camber lines flattened out like deflated tires.
By freeing up the fiberglass in its belly to compress, Völkl’s M5 Mantra creates the energy to recoil off the edge and fire the skier through the turn transition. It’s expert skiing as it used to be, before it became popular to make off-trail skis that were built more for skidding than carving.
The M5 Mantra is the antidote to the smeary ski. It’s not a ski for floating over fluffy drifts of powder. Instead, it dives into pow and blows it up from the bottom, using the energy out of the turn to bring the ski up to the surface like a dolphin. No other ski in the genre is as firmly committed to carving through thick and thin as the M5.
For the skier with established carving skills looking for a ski unintimidated by rough-and-tumble terrain, the revitalized M5 Mantra is your kind of board. The M5 was focused from its conception to serve the needs and meet the expectations of experts, which is why it doesn’t smear as readily as the rest of the AMW contingent.
Before Liberty could make an all-mountain ski that could go head-to-head against the world’s best, it first had to learn to make a great Frontside ski. Like most small-batch brands, Liberty began by making the wider skis that the mainstream brands underserved. Their first imperative was to make a light and maneuverable off-trail ski, not an on-trail carver.
Two years ago that changed when Liberty mastered a means of inserting vertical aluminum struts into their customary carbon and bamboo structures. The test run for the new Vertical Metal Technology (VMT) was a 3-model series in waist widths of 76, 82 and 92mm. Most small brands attempts at carving skis border on the comically bad, but the V-Series skis were a stunning exception. They could deliver a punch on hard snow and come off the edge with authority.
Last year, the original, dual-strut construction was applied to an All-Mountain West design, bringing Frontside-quality edge hold to a more floaty silhouette. The trait that distinguishes the evolv100’s personality from the rest of the AMW pack is directly attributable to Liberty’s VMT concept. The instant a shock tries to deflect the ski off course, the struts resist the deformation and stick the ski back on the snow before the pilot knows it ever left. Snow contact is maintained in all snow conditions but is especially notable in wind-affected crud, where many rockered forebodies flounder.
For 20/21, Nordica has applied the lessons learned in making the latest iterations of Enforcers to the first-born of the family. The alterations include a construction change and the ability to adjust the contact points (where the rocker and camber zones meet) for each size. Core profile and sidecut are also tweaked with each length, so the new Enforcer 100 calibrates performance by size.
The biggest change in on-snow comportment between the ancestral Enforcer and the newbie is in the forgiveness and ease of use departments. Not that the old boy has been gutted – far from it. But the new kid seems to transition to its camber zone more smoothly and while it’s still lively off the edge, it’s easier to decamber in its longer lengths. It’s unusually easy to feather the edge or switch from carving to drifting to match the terrain.
The acid test for an all-terrain ski with aspirations of greatness is a powder-covered mogul field that was untouched… two hours ago. The Enforcer 100 looks at this dumpster-fire of a ski run with the preternatural calm of the Buddha. It’s not worried if you’re not. Don’t be afraid to floor it, for the 2021 Enforcer 100 still has the wood-and-metal guts of a GS race ski. Intimidation is not in its vocabulary. This is why you get an all-terrain ski in the first place.
The key to the Bent Chetler 100’s charms is it Horizon Tech tip and tail which are rockered on both axes. Its crowned extremities allow the littler Chetler to drift in any direction on a whim without losing control of trajectory. When in its element, it’s the epitome of ease, rolling over terrain like a spatula over icing.
The Bent Chetler 100 is all about freedom of expression rather than the tyranny of technical turns. Showing up early in the turn isn’t its shtick, but it has talents Technical skis never imagined, like throwing it in reverse off a precipice. It’s light, it’s easy to pivot and it’s wide enough to float in two feet of fresh. If you evaluate the Bent Chetler 100 for what it does rather than what it isn’t meant to do, it’s an all-star in a league of its own.
Although the Bent Chetler 100 is a directional ski, its unique design lends itself to omni-directional skiing. This pegs its probable skier profile as a young male with aerial antics on his bucket list. But it would be underselling the Bent Chetler 100 to lump it with Pipe & Park twin-tips. Its preference for soft snow is hardly a character flaw in an All-Mountain West model. Anyone looking for a great value in an all-terrain ski can’t do any better than a Bent Chetler 100.
