One thing that hasn’t changed about the Cham is the shape, which houses a turn-on-a-dime slalom-turn skill set inside a longer frame that assists flotation without inhibiting pivoting. This allows the Cham 2.0 97 to smudge a turn in a tight couloir or gallop headlong down the fall line with equal facility. The way its pintail rearbody is tucked in, the Cham can be counted on to readily release the turn to avoid any awkward hang-ups.
The new Enforcer 93 is a spin-off of the widely lauded Enforcer 100, with whom it shares an appetite for all recipes for crud. One look at it’s amply rockered baseline tells you that no matter how well it performs on prepared slopes, it’s personality is definitely inclined to travel off-trail where the broken, irregular terrain actually has a calming effect
Like many skis with two sheets of Titanal in its guts, the Enforcer 93 likes to have some wind in its sails before its helmsman tries to maneuver. Once rolling, it’s relatively short contact area makes it feel quicker edge to edge than expected from a ride with a fairly portly 93mm waist.
The all-mountain skis K2 introduced last year looked nothing like the 15-year parade of models that preceded them. The older generation of K2’s earned a huge following by being super simple to ski and as damp as soup.
The new K2’s, christened iKonic, stripped away a decade’s worth of embellishments in search of a leaner, more sensitive ski that would be both lighter and more reactive. To make a possibly inappropriate extended metaphor: compared to skiing, say, the Aftershock, skiing the iKonic 85 Ti is like waking up inside a B movie to find your wife is suddenly 20 years younger.