Santa Ana 88
After years of painstaking research, I’ve come to the astonishing conclusion that men and women are different. This probably isn’t the ideal place to present all the evidence that led me to this epiphany, so I’ll limit my remarks to the curious case...Santa Ana 93
Much as I hate to undermine my own methodology, I encourage you to ignore the niggling difference between the Santa Ana 93’s Power and Finesse scores that allowed it to migrate from the Power collective to the Finesse family this season. Its personality didn’t change over the summer, but a couple of new scores shifted it from one side of the Power/Finesse border to the other. The Santa Ana 93 still favors the strong, technical skier who is comfortable carrying speed, but it’s so good at off-trail skills like drifting and staying calm while crud-busting that it can’t help but earn high marks for Finesse properties.
The very fact that the Santa Ana 93 can slip so easily across the Power/Finesse divide tells you that it’s neither one nor the other, but both. One look at its double-rockered baseline reveals why it moves so smoothly from on-trail to off: the blunt tip bends abruptly upward, doing the job of riding over irregular terrain quickly so most of the ski can be fully cambered. It’s as if a high-powered Frontside ski were hiding inside a loose-tipped powder vehicle.
Santa Ana 100
The Nordica Santa Ana 100 is easily the most torsionally rigid of our four Recommended women’s All-Mountain West models, usually an indicator of a higher Power quotient, yet it’s so easy to ski – for advanced to expert women – that its scores landed it on the Finesse side of the ledger. But as I occasionally stress in these pages, while the numbers are instructive, they don’t reveal as much about a ski’s character as the narrative. Listen closely to what a couple of our testers had to say about the Santa Ana 100 and you’ll hear suggestions that both these ladies thought the ski is, if anything, too powerful.
“Great all around ski,” is the general assessment of Jolee from Footloose, with this proviso: ”A little too much ski for hard pack, but for a woman who charges it’s terrific. Handles great off groomed snow,” she adds. Becca Pierce from Bobo’s test team skied the Santa Ana 100 in rapidly softening spring conditions, which Becca found it ideally adapted for. “These skis were meant for today’s conditions. A tad long for yours truly in the bumps, but assuming I were a stronger skier, I’d bet they’d be tits. Would be great in pow, and awesome control in this slop. Loved the stability.”