By trimming the thickness of its Titanal laminates, Stöckli made the 2018 iteration a little softer tip to tail. This makes the new Stormrider 95 feel more forgiving and easier to bow into an arc that cuts as clean an arc as a Technical ski. Paul Jacobs of California Ski Company composed this panegyric to its virtues: “Stable, powerful and precise. The faster you go, the smoother it skis, yet not difficult to ski at lower speeds. Feels like a Mercedes AMG Hammer, composed over the worst surfaces. Probably the best executed ski on the planet.”
If the EXP 100 HD sounds like an over-sized carving ski, well, it is. Most of the skis in the All-Mountain West genre reside near the middle of a series of decidedly off-trail skis, whereas the EXP 100 HD sits at the top of an Experience family that’s comprised primarily of Frontside models. As befits the leader of the Experience clan, the 100 is the most powerful, with two sheets of Titanal under the hood, and the most demanding.
3D.Glass would be nothing fancier than another base layer of glass were it not for a clever modification: in the binding area the glass extends vertically up the sidewall and over the top of it. It’s sort of a demi-torsion box, with much the same effect as this time-honored glass molding technique: the ski becomes both more torsionally rigid and livelier, as the hard-wired memory of the glass will dominate the rebound characteristic.
The Black Pearl is such a runaway hit that Blizzard applied the name to every model in its All-Mountain Freeride collection, rechristening the Samba as the Black Pearl 98. More than just the name is new: the Black Pearl 98 has considerably more shape than the Samba and the front rocker is made to connect a little earlier. These changes elevate the new ski’s hard snow performance without diminishing its natural predisposition to ski anything else but.
The newest Bonafide earned gushing accolades from veteran testers like Bob Gleason of Boot Doctors: “As the Bonafide has displayed for years, this ski is dynamically versatile. They play like a symphony at various speeds, terrain, and snow conditions. The subtle difference of the new Bonafide is the lengthened side cut in the ski’s forebody. The new Bonafide enters the turn earlier with stronger initiation. It feels like suspension tuned for charging into the turn.”
