Where Did My Skis’ Camber Go?
Now that we are firmly planted in the Age of Rocker, a lot of marketing focus has been trained on the ski’s camber line, or, in the absence of camber, its baseline. For the purposes of this essay, let’s consider a completely flat ski – one with zero camber – to rest on the “zero line.” (In geometry one would refer to this line as the X-axis, but as Americans loathe mathematics in all its manifestations, I’ll stick with “zero line.”) Any skier with an AARP card who looks at a current model with minimal camber underfoot would presume it to be a soggy noodle meant for a New School audience. This presumption may be on target, as there are flat baseline skis with all the life of limp linguini. But the absence of a rigid arch underfoot does not necessarily mean that the ski under inspection will sleepwalk down the hill. In fact, skis with a very shallow, easy-to-compress camber line may harbor brilliant rebound characteristics, their responsiveness hidden just below the zero line.
Before traditionalists can get their wool sweaters in a knot, allow me to explain. A ski’s rebound traits reside largely in its fiberglass structure. Fiberglass is wonderful stuff for ski manufacturing because of its exceptional strength-to-weight ratio, its relatively low cost (compared to carbon or metal), the different ways it can be deployed and in no small part because once molded it has excellent memory. Rebound is the result of fiberglass using the coiled energy built up in its compression to return to its home position once the load is released. Whether the ski is trying to return to an arched position or a relatively flat position, it can still be programmed to return home with zip whenever the skier drops a hip.
One might be tempted to think that this below-the-zero-line rebound is some tepid affair that freeriders surfing around in powder mistake for real responsiveness. One would be wrong. While examples are indeed present in the world of rockered all-mountain skis, they are also to be found in the hallowed halls of elite racing. I don’t think there’s any argument that Head is making some of the finest racing skis in the world. Their true race slalom, the iSL RD, offers minimal resistance above the zero line yet it seems capable not just of energetically projecting its pilot into the next arc, but into the winner’s circle as well.
The point of this peroration is that when shopping for skis, the predominance of rockered/early-rise skis means that camber line is almost inevitably going to enter into the discussion. It may even dominate the discussion, as if camber line alone determined all aspects of ski behavior. But with today’s new baselines, what you see is not always what you get. Visual inspection is not a reliable predictor of behavior. As has been true since skis were first whittled from a solid slab of wood, you have to ski them to evaluate them. A properly built ski is a complex matrix of materials, construction techniques, math and imagination. No one thing makes a great ski great; rather it is everything in the ski and how the components work together that make them magic on the snow.
– Jackson Hogen
