The Black Pearl is such a runaway hit that Blizzard applied the name to every model in its All-Mountain Freeride collection, rechristening the Samba as the Black Pearl 98. More than just the name is new: the Black Pearl 98 has considerably more shape than the Samba and the front rocker is made to connect a little earlier. These changes elevate the new ski’s hard snow performance without diminishing its natural predisposition to ski anything else but.
Liz Elling of Gravity Sports finds the Black Pearl 98 “less planky than the Samba. Quick, easy; made lovely turns. Love the new changes they made!” For those of you who haven’t been keeping up with the pace of product evolution at Blizzard, last season it launched a new women’s specific design called exactly that. The idea behind W.S.D. is to take a page from the backcountry playbook and rely on a unidirectional carbon topsheet to bear a lot of the structural burden without heavier glass. The use of lightweight carbon also allows the W.S.D. core to be an all-wood affair.
The combination of W.S.D. and the more carvilicious shape of the Black Pearl 98 makes the new ski feel snakier, more maneuverable and more responsive. Note the nearly identical scores for Power and Finesse properties, indicating how easy it is to manage across a broad range of behaviors, from slow, short-radius carves in boot-top powder to guns-blazing charges down a crud field. For delivering on the promise of making off-trail skiing easier, we award the Black Pearl 98 a Silver Skier Selection.