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.
Strictly speaking, Kästle’s LX82 isn’t a women’s ski. It exists, in part, because Kästle’s stock on-piste ski for many years, the exquisite MX83, had the mass of a collapsing star. To broaden its appeal in central Europe’s most important market segment, Kästle created the 2-model LX series, so lightweights of either gender could experience the liquid flow of the MX’s.
If the LX82 has a point of view, other than favoring less avoirdupois applied to its midsection, it’s that carving is cool and other pursuits are peripheral. Its character is written in its baseline, a fully cambered affair with a Fast Grip Shovel, so the instant it’s tipped it begins to carve an arc that seems to last from takeoff to landing.
Some day, there will be a museum for everything; in the History of Ski Design Museum, the display devoted to today’s All-Mountain East genre will showcase the Völkl Kendo. The ski beneath the name has subtly mutated every few seasons, most recently last year; the consensus among Realskiers’ testers is that the current incarnation is the best suited to, well, everything.
What makes the Kendo so well admired by so many skiers is that it’s truly ready for anything. Powered by two sheets of Titanal around a multi-layered wood core, the Kendo retains enough camber underfoot to generate energy at the end of the arc, propelling the skier from turn to turn. This is the key to the Kendo’s confidence-building behavior 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.
