Just because Powder skis lie at the opposite end of the width spectrum from Technical skis, don’t think for a moment Head won’t bring all their technical talents to bear when concocting an obese board.

Do they use all the highfalutin tech in their World Cup race skis?  Of course not.  Not only would such a move make the skis ungodly heavy, worse yet, the race tech wouldn’t even work. So Head went another direction, embedding a web of shock-absorbing elastomers at tip and tail and encasing it in a fiberglass shell to boost torsional rigidity.

Called rather unromantically the Tip and Tail Stabilizer System, the method must work, for the Cyclic 115 is rockered to the moon and back yet motors along like it had four-wheel drive.  It does a couple of tricks you’d swear a 115 couldn’t, like slide through bumps or cut a short arc from a highly pitched edge, exiting the turn with a little burst of energy.

Of course as a 115 the Cyclic can smear like a finger painter, but the surprise is how easy it is to get on edge.   You can even go “super-carving” on a low-angle, groomed slope and the Cyclic slinks along on its smiley-face baseline as if this were the most fun it’s ever had.  (It isn’t.)

A lot of fat boys steer with the subtlety of a barge.  The Cyclic is no water nymph either, but it can go all day on a pow day without you ever thinking about changing skis. “So much in one ski,” says the pleasantly stunned Charlie from Peter Glenn.  You can almost hear, in those 5 simple words, the longing for another run.