The Kore 117 looks the size of a life raft in a 189cm, but it steers easily despite its girth. The skier doesn’t feel its heft, only the ease it imparts by drifting like a putty knife, smearing over the choppy terrain. Mercifully, it doesn’t need a high edge angle to remain stable and even stays calm when running flat. Almost any Powder ski will help a lower skill skier survive; it takes a strong ski to satisfy an expert who intends to lay it over and charge the fall line. The Kore 117 is as exhilarating for experts as it is forgiving to those in need of forgiveness.
The Catamaran’s fully rockered, twin-tip design is made by and for athletes who prize creativity over convention. Drifting isn’t a demerit but a form of passive aggression, a way for the skier to hit the brakes, focus in and straight-line to a massive air. The Catamaran can sustain this sort of treatment because its aspen/fir core is bolstered by carbon stringers strong enough to support a skier dropping forty feet to a switch landing.
The Pinnacle 118 was already nearly perfect pow ski before K2 decided to devote a spindle or two of its unique weaving octopus to carbon fiber, creating the Carbon Boost Braid. The all-glass Pinnacle 118 of yesteryear weighed almost as much as comparable models with two sheets of Titanal; the addition of carbon means the subtraction of glass, empowering the 2019 Pinnacle to do more with less. The interlacing of carbon and glass augments the Pinnacle 118’s established ability to ride just a thin rail of edge when all the pow it used to lean into is gone. In a field of drifters, the Pinnacle 118 is one of the few that can carve its way out of trouble
When I refer to a Power Powder ski’s ability to carve like a much narrower ski, I’m not kidding, but neither am I telling the whole story. A wide ski with camber in the belly of its baseline, like the Kästle BMX115, provides a solid platform that won’t swim under pressure. On groomers, the skier notices the slender edge that’s dug in the snow more than the behemoth slab of ski that isn’t. As long as the ski is on edge, awareness of its ballooned dimensions is suppressed.
If all you knew about the Line Sick Day 114 were its waist width (114mm), sidecut radius (23.9m) and that it’s tip and tail were tapered, you’d expect it to turn with all the agility and grace of the Exxon Valdez. And you might be right if Line ladled on the Titanal, but the Sick Day 114 is unshackled by metal bonds. It retains the springiness of an all-glass ski, and lo and behold, it steers with ease of a far shapelier ski. Its tapered tip keeps it from diving into a turn at the very top, so it smears its way through turn entry before settling on an edge that rolls comfortably through rubble.
