The Black Pearl 88 is the most popular women’s ski of its generation, but there’s a new gal in town itching for an off-trail showdown. The contender, the Sheeva 9, comes from another branch of the Blizzard model tree, one with a history of making softer off-trail skis that emphasize ease and liveliness over bulldozer strength. The Sheeva’s signature feature, dubbed D.R.T. for Dynamic Release Technology, is visible in outline just below the topskin. It’s a partial sheet of Titanal that’s edge to edge through the midsection and tapers to a narrow tab before reaching either end. D.R.T. allows the forebody to roll with punches delivered by off-trail terrain, leaving the reinforced middle to power its way through the rubble.
For a ski that’s rockered at tip and tail, the Black Pearl 78 reaped rave scores for its connection to the top of the turn and its natural facility at short-radius turns. The Black Pearl 78 gets its sneaky quicks from its Flipcore baseline. The secret to Flipcore’s success is that it places no stress on the transition between the slightly elevated tip and tail and the camber zone underfoot. As soon as the ski is tipped, any amount of pressure melds the rockered areas with the middle, creating a continuous edge that doesn’t need any extra oomph to hold, even on groomers. For a ski with a high performance ceiling, the Black Pearl 78 owns the distinction of earning the highest score in the genre for Short-Radius Turns and the second highest for Low-Speed Turning.
Women and men aren’t so different, at least when it comes to what they need in a powder ski. The Sheeva 10 and wider Sheeva 11 (112mm underfoot @ 172cm, $840) deliver what both genders are after: a stable foundation that won’t wilt in a crisis and a forgiveness that masks small errors so they don’t become big ones. The imperturbable center of the Sheevas is a top laminate of Titanal that runs nearly edge-to-edge underfoot but tapers to a blunt tongue that doesn’t quite reach either tip or tail. The extremities are deliberately left loose so they can roll with the punches that crud skiing delivers.
Blizzard raised the performance bar on its top Quattro models, injecting a large dose of carbon into its Frontside flagships. C-Spine Technology consists of two bi-directional carbon layers that work in concert with the Quattro 8.4 Ti’s existing Titanal laminates to improve damping and responsiveness. If the benefits of all that carbon were condensed to a single word it would be “smoothness.” The addition of C-Spine hasn’t altered the Quattro 84 Ti’s groomed snow orientation – its score for Off-Piste Performance remains around a full point below the category norm – but it has made it a mellower, more secure ride within its hard snow domain.
The Big Mountain design playbook calls for tips and tails that are both rockered and tapered so they won’t interfere with the smearing action that takes the travail out of off-trail travel, and the Rustler 10 is typical in this regard. Where it deviates from the norm is through its midsection, which is capped by a Titanal plate that’s edge-to-edge underfoot and narrows to a nub that stops halfway up the forebody and tail. The Titanal delivers discernibly more power and deflection resistance than the carbon-reinforced extremities. Testers appreciated the lighter weight that helped the Rustler 10 feel quicker than most Big Mountain models.
