The mere softening of the flex pattern couldn’t have made the Monster 98 a better ski if it weren’t already a damn good one. Among its bundle of admirable traits are a few features that are becoming so rare they’re endangered: a forebody that engages the snow the moment it’s tipped, a tail that’s more squared off rather than turned up and just enough rocker to rationalize calling them rockered. They sure don’t behave like typical rockered skis. They perform like race skis wearing a fat suit.
K2’s Luv Boat 108 had only been afloat for a year when it was scuttled a year ago and replaced with the Luv Boat 105, a modestly modified spin-off of the Pinnacle 105. K2’s merger of the women’s specific Luv Boat 108 with the unisex Pinnacle 105 was inevitable, as the raison d’être of the Pinnacle was to pare away as much weight as possible without impairing performance, a women’s market mission if ever there was one.
The most notable feature of the new K2 Catamaran is its asymmetric tip profile. As the Catamaran is a twin-tip, naturally the tail is likewise asymmetric. In action, the uphill ski engages less with the snow. The asymmetric effect is somewhat mitigated by the Catamaran’s full Powder rocker that keeps its ends off the snow.
Bob Gleason of Boot Doctors sensed the change in the new iKonic 84ti, calling it, “a new feel for K2, a true all mountain carver. The elongated sidecut connects immediately with substantial power. A top contender among all mountain carvers,” he concludes. By “elongated sidecut,” Gleason is referring to the fact that the widest point in the iKonic 84ti’s forebody is up in the shovel, so the edge behind it provides a continuous rail all the way into the tail. In other words, neither tip nor tail is tapered as they would be on a Big Mountain model.
The contrast between how the Pinnacle 118 looks and how it skis is striking. It looks like another big barge of a Powder ski, but it handles like an acrobatic All-Mountain model. Unlike most Powder skis that prefer to bank off a wall of snow on their bases, the Pinnacle 118 will hold a carved turn with only its edge in the snow. Because its edge grips so well and its core isn’t too torsionally rigid, the Pinnacle 118 skis feels quicker edge to edge than other skis with its XXXL dimensions.
