To cut it as a Power Powder model, a ski has to be stable at speed, not in the static society of homogenous groomers, but in the wild, ever-changing world that is crud. (If Heraclitus had been a freeskier, he might have said, “You can’t traverse the same crud field twice, bro.”) The Cham 2.0 117 is a certified crud stomper, with settings from “Smear” to “Slice.”
The Enforcer’s on edge authority derives from a no nonsense construction – all wood core filling in a metal sandwich – applied to a cambered baseline. It’s the shape of this baseline that’s the Enforcer’s special sauce: the forward contact point is pulled back 25% from the tip and the rear contact retreats 5% along the tail. While the rockered areas are pronounced, they are relatively low-angle so that any act of tipping and pressuring is sufficient to put the extremities back in snow contact. A blunt, low-profile “Hammerhead” shovel design keeps the tip closer to the surface, thereby reducing tip flap on hard snow.
If you are an aficionado of twin-tip design, then the Blizzard Gunsmoke is your kind of ski. Characteristic of the genre, the Gunsmoke maintains a loose connection to the snow whether it’s soft or hard. Compared to the down-the-fall-line orientation of the Bodacious, the Gunsmoke is a swivel stick.
But compared to many other twin tips, the Gunsmoke is a paradigm of stability. It pushes piles of set-up crud aside like a super villain parting a crowd of civilians. Skis 114mm wide at the waist aren’t particularly easy to hoist up to a high edge, but if you have the skills to get the Gunsmoke there, it holds.