The key to the Samba’s go-anywhere attitude lies in its Flip Core baseline that predisposes the forebody to ride over anything in front of it without disconnecting it from the rest of the ski. As soon as the Samba is laid over, the skier can depend on every centimeter of the ski supporting her. Secure enough on edge to carve all day, the Samba saves its best moves for soft snow, where it helps the uninitiated learn to mix smearing and steering into a lively downhill dance.
The Stormrider 100 Motion doesn’t like to wait. It’s as eager as every other Stöckli to show its owner what happens when a nation of watchmakers applies its fetish for precision to building a performance ski. It aims its prow into powder with the enthusiasm of a kid rope-swinging into a pond. It exudes an all-in attitude that inspires aerial entries.
Crud skiing requires courage. The herky-jerky gait of slow-speed struggles through the slop doesn’t auger well for ramping up the aggression. Yet stomping on the accelerator is the only way to make manky crud manageable. Some skis fold like a lawn chair under this stress. The Stormrider 100 Motion lives for it.
The most prominent impression left by the Venturi 95 is of smoothness that remains unruffled no matter where it’s led. It holds an edge even when there’s no surface to edge into. When all semblance of softness has been pounded away, the Venturi 95 doesn’t bat an eye but continues to spool off medium-radius arcs as easily as a Vegas dealer spins out cards.
The Venturi 95 pulls off this neat trick by using a proprietary design that adheres a matrix of shock-sucking elastomer covered in a fiberglass shell to both the tip and tail. This feature is to shock what black holes are to light.
Often “wider” translates as “less maneuverable,” but Atomic’s Vantage 95 C W confounds the conventional in more ways than one. The widest of the women’s Vantage series, the 95 C W manages to mask its width by being more effervescent, coming off the bottom of a powder turn as light as a Champagne bubble rising upwards to the surface of a flute.
Concealed behind Line’s devil-may-care attitude is a serious ski maker who manufacturers more traditional, cambered, directional models than they do center-mounted twin tips. Its Supernatural and Sick Day series are actually old-fashioned in their wood and fiberglass constructions, with just a touch of tip and tail rocker to qualify as off-trail tools.
The simplicity of the Supernatural 100’s construction contributes to its playful attitude and easy-steering properties. As a cambered, glass ski, the Supernatural 100 pops out of the turn even in powder, giving it a lively but controlled rebound that carries the skier into the next turn. (Note its highest technical score is for Rebound/turn finish, an unusual result that highlights this ski’s special property.)