If you drop the reins and put the Cochise in charge, “no terrain can stand in its way,” as Eric from Footloose confirms. This is one ski that won’t back down in the face of adversity, no matter what form it takes, be it wind crust, corn that’s turned to porridge or simply whatever’s still left to plunder after 11:00 AM on a powder day.
If this sounds like the Cochise hasn’t changed much after a couple of make-overs to thin the core and add carbon to the ends of its Flip Core, well, it has changed and it hasn’t. There’s no question it’s become more user-friendly as far as its pilot is concerned, but it continues to want to dominate whatever off-road condition it confronts.
The lower rocker profile of Cham 2.0, which brings more ski into snow contact sooner, was a pure improvement, a product tweak without a downside. As applied to the Cham 2.0 107, it means a greater connection to earth without losing the ability to swivel out of trouble. As Bobby from Powder House pens, containing his enthusiasm considering his 98/100 score, the “Cham 2.0 107 is attached to the ground.”
This may sound like faint praise, but Bobby knows that many Big Mountain models are so intent on swiveling and surfing that the small platform they work from feels connected by a base layer of ball bearings. That sounds easy until you try to tame it.
To create a ski that will charge all day without exhausting its pilot’s energy account, Faction uses its innovative balsa/flax core to keep the weight down, an issue that grows more ponderous with each additional size. (Note that the CT 3.0 can be had in a 204cm, a length not seen in a ski brochure since the last millennium.)
Amply rockered fore (10mm elevation declining over 200mm) and aft (5mm of loft receding 150cm from the tail), the CT 3.0 is an every-terrain ski with a particular aptitude for deep snow. Its shallow sidecut (20m @ 182cm) isn’t made to steer very far out of the fall line, inspiring Bob Gleason of Telluride’s Boot Doctors to inscribe, “For a skilled skier, a great charger. Strong carve with a crisp turn release, with good hold and smooth at speed.”
The CT 2.0 remains a glass laminate ski, which is where it gets its pop, but for 2017 the glass sandwiches a poplar/beech core and the whole stack is capped with a protective shell that rests on the sidewalls. The effect, according to Ty from California Ski Company, is “like a stiffer, better Gunsmoke (narrower of course).” Michael from Footloose pegs the CT 2.0 as a “playful ski for the aggressive skier.”
K2’s Luv Boat 108 had only been afloat for a year when it was scuttled and replaced with the Luv Boat 105, a modestly modified spin-off of the Pinnacle 105, itself only a year out of R&D. K2’s merger of the women’s specific Luv Boat 108 with the unisex Pinnacle 105 was inevitable, as the raison d’être of the Pinnacle was to pare away as much weight as possible without impairing performance, a women’s market mission if ever there was one.
