What the Backland FR 102 wants to dine on is a buffet of off-trail conditions. Its double-rockered baseline fits in the twisted troughs of today’s mogul fields. The cambered midsection gives the ski extra energy between turns, inviting the skier to move to its rhythmic beat. The sense of automatic weighting and unweighting is particularly evident in powder, where the Backland FR 102 would just as soon spend 100% of its time, but then, who wouldn’t?
If you’re going to adapt a women’s model from a unisex template, the first place to renovate is the core. Atomic swaps ash for poplar to reduce weight without losing the damping benefits of wood. Atomic’s second modification is subtler, reining in the widest point in the tail so it isn’t as insistent on a cross-hill turn finish and reduces stress on the inherently more vulnerable female knee. The third alteration elevates the heel in order to tip a women’s more rearward center of mass into a balanced stance, with more weight directed to the ball of the foot as in a natural athletic position.
It’s unlikely that the new Atomic Redster X9 will instantly make you a better skier; it’s a certainty it’ll make you feel like one. The Redster X9 is built to turn speed into more speed by maintaining edge contact no matter how hard you try to make it fly. It’s signature technology, Servotec, is meant to impart the impression of power steering by making it easy to find an early edge and holding it for as little or as long as you like.
For the beleaguered skier on a budget, it must seem like every highly rated model has a core made from Caspian Sea caviar. Thank goodness for the Atomic Vantage 85 W. With a down-to-earth street price of $399, it’s perfect for the intermediate woman who wants to ski more of the mountain. The Vantage 85 W is so affordable because its construction sticks to the essentials and eliminates the extraneous. A light wood core encased in a slip of fiberglass provides support and energy; a thick vertical sidewall puts direct pressure on the edge, giving the Vantage 85 W the tenacity of pricier rides.
The Vantage 95 C W’s shape strikes just the right balance between the surface area needed flotation and the sidecut that facilitates carving. This is why this model feels so easy to ski regardless of the conditions. The Vantage 95 C W passes the acid test of an off-trail ski: how well does it handle conditions it wasn’t made for? One of our testers encountered just such terrain and came out smiling. “This ski was great, especially going over the ice cookies. I felt like I could cruise through anything.”