At the heart of every lightweight design is carbon, and the Sheeva 10 has plenty of it, both in stringers in its glass laminates and in unidirectional inserts at tip and tail that help lower swingweight. Its signature feature is a Titanal laminate that runs nearly edge-to-edge underfoot but tapers to a blunt tongue that doesn’t quite reach either tip or tail. The intent is to add stability underfoot but keep the rest of the ski looser, so it can contort to absorb irregular terrain.
Brilliance on a high edge comes at the price of making a short arc, with the ever-accelerating speeds bigger turns engender. You’ll never get a ski with the 100 Eight’s sidecut to carve a tidy arc, but it has the solution on demand: a fully rockered baseline without a whisper of camber to interfere with a smudged slide. If you want to aim the other way RIGHT NOW, just turn your feet. No unpleasant contortions required.
You won’t find another ski with a 112mm waist and 23.5m sidecut radius that would rather carve on a high edge angle than smear like a putty knife. It’s not that it won’t drift – of course it will – but it feels predisposed to carve on its razor-thin 3D.Ridge of compressed carbon. The V-Werks Katana was the test pilot for the 3D.Ridge design that has since permeated Völkl’s high-end All-Mountain and Frontside models. The V-Werks Katana proved that the concept could apply equally well to deep-sidecut carving skis and broad-beam powder surfers.
If you’re fortunate enough to catch first tracks, it almost doesn’t matter which All-Mountain West model you’re on. They all offer approximately the same flotation, and fresh snow is so consistent that skis sustain relatively little shock. It’s on runs 2 through 20 that you’ll be particularly pleased you’re on an Aura. Cut-up snow is utter bliss if you ski it right and pure hell if you don’t. Whether you spend the day upright and smiling or upside down looking for your goggles depends a great deal on the tool you use.
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.