The key to the Bent Chetler 100’s charms is it Horizon Tech tip and tail which are rockered on both axes. Its crowned extremities allow the littler Chetler to drift in any direction on a whim without losing control of trajectory. When in its element, it’s the epitome of ease, rolling over terrain like a spatula over icing.
The Bent Chetler 100 is all about freedom of expression rather than the tyranny of technical turns. Showing up early in the turn isn’t its shtick, but it has talents Technical skis never imagined, like throwing it in reverse off a precipice. It’s light, it’s easy to pivot and it’s wide enough to float in two feet of fresh. If you evaluate the Bent Chetler 100 for what it does rather than what it isn’t meant to do, it’s an all-star in a league of its own.
Although the Bent Chetler 100 is a directional ski, its unique design lends itself to omni-directional skiing. This pegs its probable skier profile as a young male with aerial antics on his bucket list. But it would be underselling the Bent Chetler 100 to lump it with Pipe & Park twin-tips. Its preference for soft snow is hardly a character flaw in an All-Mountain West model. Anyone looking for a great value in an all-terrain ski can’t do any better than a Bent Chetler 100.
Tester: Jill Beers
The Blackops Blazer is one the most fun and dependable skis I’ve skied. This ski can handle any terrain and conditions I’m thrown while ripping around my home resort of Alta, Utah. From railing turns on hard-packed corduroy during chilly early mornings, to cutting through the afternoon crud post-pow day, this ski proves to be an extremely stable yet playful option. The 98mm waist makes it my ideal one-quiver ski for West coast shredding, but I was equally impressed with how it handled when I took it to the East coast for a week. This Blazer has come a long way from when I was able to help out during early testing a few years back and has since become the perfect ski for all the lady shredders that want an all-mountain charger to take them from bell to bell.
Like all brands, Blizzard is under pressure to periodically renew every corner of its collection. The trick the brand has had to pull off several times is refreshing its successful designs without fundamentally changing them. To alter the Bonafide’s feel without sacrificing its identity is an intricate challenge that Blizzard attacked from the inside out.
A great all-terrain ski begins with a well-balanced flex, which begins with the core. To obtain just the right pressure distribution, thin bands of dense beech are inlaid among poplar laminates, a design Blizzard calls TrueBlend. Each TrueBlend core is optimized not just by model, but by size, as well. In essence, the Bonafide 97 isn’t one new model, but six.
Once Blizzard committed to the TrueBlend core, it reassessed all of its properties, including baseline (the length and severity of the tip and tail rockers) and sidecut. The cumulative effect is that the new Bonafide rolls to the edge compliantly, ready to grip according to the pilot’s dictates of edge angle and pressure.
One of the complaints leveled against earlier editions of the Bonafide was that it favored expert skiers. While that’s still true of the longest length, the charge won’t hold water against the shorter sizes. The Bonafide 97 still favors experts, but only because any great ski is always best appreciated by those with the skills to extract its elite performance.
