You might expect Line to make cores from hemp stalks and use ayahuasca as a base treatment. But there’s nothing particularly avant-garde about how Line builds its skis. Yes, there are full-length carbon stringers in the new Sick Day 104, always a nice touch, but this hardly qualifies as cutting edge. The wood core is all aspen, a nod to the current obsession with lightness. Wood layered with glass and a dash of carbon is as traditional a recipe as pot roast. Not that there’s anything wrong with that; it’s just more mainstream than you may realize given Line’s anti-Establishment posturing.
The new core created for the Enforcer 110 (and Enforcer Pro) embodies several more clever ideas. The central core uses a relatively thin laminate of poplar, beech and balsa around a channel of foam that it sheaths in top and bottom sheets of .4mm Titanium. To compensate for the added weight of metal, the Enforcer 110 core replaces heavy glass layers with laminates of carbon fiber prepreg. The resulting structure weighs no more than the Patron, the model the Enforcer 110 replaces in the Nordica line, despite sporting two sheets of Ti the Patron lacked. Quite the coup.
Making lighter weight skis has been a Salomon specialty since it concocted the first commercially successful monocoque skis many moons ago. Now Salomon has made its best women’s powder ski ever, the QST Stella 106, that proudly sports “Full Sandwich Sidewalls 360o” or expressed in generic terms, a square sidewall, the very design feature that the monocoque cap obsoleted for several seasons.
Although the new Soul 7 HD looks dramatically different from earlier editions, its basic shape and character haven’t changed. While the sexy-looking tip gets all the attention in the store, the Soul 7 HD’s most distinctive feature on the snow is its springy camber pocket that unloads with an elevating pop off the bottom of every arc. This gives the ski its energetic personality that persists in all forms of powder, from Sierra sludge to Wasatch Champagne.
“Powerful GS turns,” purrs Pete from California Ski Company. “No speed limit. Felt stable at Mach ∞,” he notes admiringly. It’s not the raw speed per se, that’s so enthralling, but the ease at which the Stormrider 105 attains it and the uses it to fashion turns short enough to tuck into couloirs and long enough to ravage open bowls. “Killing it!!!,” exults the even more exuberant than usual Bob Gleason of Boot Doctors. “Surprisingly nimble ski for its waist size. The cross breeding of quickness, agility, and stability is in a class of its own.”
