2025 Women’s Big Mountain Skis
2025 Women’s Big Mountain Skis 2025 Women’s Big Mountain Skis There’s only one good reason for a woman to own a Big Mountain ski, and that’s flotation. It takes at least 8 inches of uncut snow to float someone on a ski, which should give you some idea how...Kore 105
The Head Kore 105 is the perfect ski for our times. No, it doesn’t promote universal love and understanding among all people, but it does what it can, considering that it’s a ski. It’s not just that it’s the lightest ski in the genre, it’s how that light weight contributes to a quickness off the edge that makes the Kore 105 feel narrower than its actual dimensions.
Another reason that the Kore 105 behaves like a skinnier ski is it adheres to a metal-free diet; the absence of Ti laminates softens its torsional rigidity, enabling it to conform to terrain rather than attempting to subdue it. This business about feeling narrower matters because it makes it reasonable to consider the Kore 105 as an everyday ski for western resort skiing.
Its ultra-light weight also makes the Kore 105 an ideal in-resort/backcountry hybrid. The biggest concern any backcountry skier has about a super-light ski is that it will be great going uphill and suck on the way down, which sort of defeats the whole purpose. There’s zero chance the Kore 105 will flame out on the descent, as it’s far more substantial than any AT model of which I am aware.
Another factor that makes the entire Kore series easier to steer off-trail is a beveled top edge that allows the ski to slice sideways almost without resistance. As foot steering is more necessity than indulgence when the snow is up to your knees, the smooth move the 105 makes laterally drastically reduces the amount of effort it takes to steer.
The final piece of the Kore 105 picture is a size run from 163cm to 191cm at 7cm splits. When selecting your ideal size, think about weight distribution – the more you weigh, the more ski you need – and flex. If you go too long, you might not be able to bend the ski, a necessity both for steering in general and for inducing the rebound energy that makes it effortless through the turn transition.
The current Kore 105 isn’t finicky about anything. There’s no need to adapt to it or ski it in any special way just because it’s light. Just hop on and ski as you naturally would. Only with less effort, a formula that works for anyone.
Kore 111
The biggest problem with skis as wide as the Kore 111 is that their shortcomings start to show up as the powder “day” fizzles out around mid-morning. The Kore 111 could care less that the powder is kaput. Perhaps because Head replaced the Koroyd used in previous Kore cores with Karuba and poplar, the Kore 111 provides the feedback of a classic, wood and fiberglass chassis despite belonging in the same weight class as an anorexic Alpine Touring model.
I realize this sounds like a stupid thing to say, but the Kore 111 doesn’t ski wide, or at least not as wide as it measures, in part because it lacks Titanal laminates. Titanal accentuates torsional rigidity, which in turn augments the sensation of width because there’s no give along the longitudinal axis of the ski. Two sheets of Titanal is also a heavy load to haul around, particularly in powder, where they promote sinking over floating. The Kore 111 can afford to kick Titanal to the curb because it has Graphene in its guts, carbon in a matrix one atom thick that’s absurdly strong and damp.
The Kore construction didn’t need the 111 to validate its growing reputation as one of the great off-trail series of all time, yet it may be the archetypical Kore that epitomizes what this design does best. One of the defining characteristics of a great ski is its ability to perform tasks at an elite level that it was never designed to do. Starting from scratch, without design or cost limitations, I doubt anyone could make a ski better adapted to off-trail skiing than the Kore 111. Yet it transitions to hard snow so seamlessly you almost want to look down to be sure they haven’t shrunk to a Frontside waistline.
About the only caveat I can concoct is that the Kore 111 could use a little cushion to push against. By that I mean, if the top 1mm of the snow surface is unrelenting, of course it’s going to drift; but if there’s even an ounce of cream for the base to brace itself, the Kore 111 knows how to come around on a line. While we don’t recommend skis this wide for all-day, hard-snow skiing, the Kore 111 can handle it if you can.
Enforcer 104
When it was introduced in 2020 as the Enforcer 104 Free, there already was an Enforcer 100 and an Enforcer 110, to go along with a 115, and a 93 and an 88. At the time, it seemed like a classic case of over-reach: why try to fit a 104 into an already over-served market for fat skis?
The original Enforcer 104 Free proved it belonged from the very first turn. It was easier to mix up turn shape and change direction in deep snow than on the Enforcer 110, while floating close enough to the surface to deliver the ease one seeks on a fat ski. In the duel between the two models for the off-trail skier’s affections, it was the 104’s greater maneuverability and terrain versatility that won out over the 110’s greater surface area. The agile 104 shape is still in the line; the more lugubrious 110 is not.
Now that it’s the chubbiest kid in the family, the Enforcer 104 is transparently Nordica’s best tool for tootling through the chop that is the prevailing condition on powder days. An ever-evolving crud field best describes the condition we encountered on the gently flowing slopes of the Shirley Lake area at Palisades Tahoe when we sallied forth with a quartet of Enforcers. Here’s the lightly edited testimony of Jim Schaffner after he had sampled the test batch.
“The Enforcer 104 was the perfect choice for the conditions today. I love how this ski drifts. It allows for amazing versatility in all terrain, all conditions, all turn shapes. Overall, the entire Enforcer group is the most cohesive group of skis that I have tested this spring. The versatility, perfect balance and ski-ability in all terrain make the 104 the best pick for someone that likes to travel off the beaten path, always looking for some chopped up or rougher snow conditions to plunder.”
One of the distinguishing characteristics of the Enforcer 104 is it can handle buffeting whether traveling straight downhill or completing every turn. Normally, precision in the fall line comes at some cost of drift-ability, but you can etch the top of a turn on the 104 and smear the bottom of the same arc, and the Enforcer 104 makes it all feel as natural as breathing.