Some day, there will be a museum for everything; in the History of Ski Design Museum, the display devoted to today’s All-Mountain East genre will showcase the Völkl Kendo. The ski beneath the name has subtly mutated every few seasons, most recently last year; the consensus among Realskiers’ testers is that the current incarnation is the best suited to, well, everything.

What makes the Kendo so well admired by so many skiers is that it’s truly ready for anything. Powered by two sheets of Titanal around a multi-layered wood core, the Kendo retains enough camber underfoot to generate energy at the end of the arc, propelling the skier from turn to turn. This is the key to the Kendo’s confidence-building behavior on hard snow.

The Kendo expects you to head off trail, so the tip is tapered, pulling back the forward contact point and allowing the forebody to torque slightly without inciting a sudden hook into an unscheduled turn. The blunt tip also eases how the forebody conforms to terrain rather than confronting it, a trait that’s helpful on the backside of bumps, when curling into wind berms or rolling over buried who-knows-what in the side country.

If you already own a world-class Frontside ski and All-Mountain West model, you don’t need a Kendo. But if you want a single ski that embodies the best of worlds, put the Kendo on your short list of candidates.

Remember the name of the genre for which the Kendo is the archetype: All-Mountain East means often skiing hard snow on narrow trails and if there’s any new snow still around, it’s in trees tighter than Amazonian brush. (They don’t call off-trail forays “bushwhacking” for nothing.)   The Kendo doesn’t care if conditions are glorious or abhorrent; they’re ready for -you guessed it – anything.