The Nordica Enforcer 104 Free and Enforcer 110 Free are both first-class Big Mountain Finesse skis – they’ve each recently held top billing in the genre – but they earn their high ratings for ease of use in different ways. The Enforcer 110 Free is inherently better at drifting and flotation, simply by dint of its superior surface area. These are critical properties for a Big Mountain ski, but they aren’t the only admirable attributes. The Enforcer 104 Free out-finesses its bigger bro with easy-steering agility, able to hew to a tighter radius whether on edge or off.
The Enforcer 104 Free even feels quicker than the narrower 185cm Enforcer 100, because you don’t detect its extra 4mm of width as much as you notice its lively response to lighter pressure. It seems to hover like a water bug over wind-battered crud, floating just above the havoc underfoot where it’s still able to move freely side to side. It smooths out the ruffles in the most ravaged terrain, turning a ratty collage of ruts into a dance floor.
Back-to-back runs on the 110 and 104 in 10 inches of partially tracked powder confirmed what one might suspect a priori – that the narrower ski was noticeably easier to steer no matter how you slice it. Whether pivoting your feet to make a short turn shorter or banking off a wind drift, the Enforcer 104 took less force to guide. To the obvious question – is a 104-waist width really necessary in a line that already has cornerstone models on its flanks in the original Enforcer 100 and the 110? – we have an equally obvious answer: oh, yes.
There are times when just a small change in geometry lands on a magic combination of shape and energy that amplifies the best qualities in a particular design. The arrival of the Enforcer 104 Free marks just such an occasion. The newest kid on the block already feels, not merely like a member of the band, but its front man.
The qualities that made the 102 FR the star product of the old Rangers were its smeary, playful baseline, its metal-free construction – making it lighter and torsionally softer – and the fact that it had the most distinctive snow feel compared to its competition in the Big Mountain genre. As Fischer made the transition to its new Ranger series that adds a dab of Titanal to every model, preserving the on-snow properties of its flagship Ranger was likely to be a high priority.
Devotees of the retired Ranger FR 102 can relax. If you loved the FR for its surfy attitude, you’ll be at least as enamored of the 2023 Ranger 102. This is still a decidedly soft snow ski, as several testers lamented given that there was precious little natural snow last season. “In fresh snow, you’ll love this ski,” reassured Mark Rafferty from Peter Glenn. “Plenty wide and playful for first tracks. If no new fresh for a few weeks, the Ranger 102 will rip fast turns on the groomers. Strong for blasting through crud. A true marvel,” he raved.
Not everyone was smitten by the Ranger 102’s soft extremities, particularly when the powder it definitely prefers is in short supply. The race-bred Jim Schaffner over-powered the Ranger 102’s forebody, undermining its edging accuracy on hard snow. “The snow was perfect for testing this type of ski,” the Start Haus owner noted, “however I found that it was too loose for my style of skiing . I can see the benefit for a skier that only seeks out the softer untracked snow and who enjoys the art of drifting and skidding.”
As Schaffner’s remarks suggest, whether the Ranger 102 is your cup of tea depends on style, not ability, although the Ranger 102’s soft flex is especially well suited to those making their first forays into sidecountry. The .5mm-thick Titanal plate in its midsection sits astride a substantial beech and poplar core, so security underfoot shouldn’t be an issue for skiers who aren’t as big and aggressive as erstwhile race coach Schaffner. All things considered, the 2023 Ranger 102 amplified its forebear’s best assets without changing its fundamental character.
One of my favorite bump skis that wasn’t intended to be a bump ski was the K2 Shreditor 102 (circa 2015). Of course, it couldn’t be as quick as a real mogul ski edge to edge, so it did most of its navigation by slarving through the troughs and slinking around the lumpy bits. The new Reckoner 102 is in several respects the same ski, albeit embellished in ways its ancestor was not.
The similarities are hard to miss. The shape of the 184cm is identical save for a tip that’s 3mm wider on the Reckoner, giving it a marginally (.7m) snugger sidecut radius. Both Shreditor and Reckoner rely on braided fibers to control flex and torsion, with the Shreditor using a Triaxial braid of fiberglass and the Reckoner using Spectral Braid spun from carbon. Both vintages use Aspen in the core, although the Shreditor complemented it with featherweight Paulownia while the Reckoner uses Aspen in concert with denser fir. Both have relatively low camber underfoot, use a reinforced sidewall for added resistance to ski-on-ski damage and both, of course, are twin-tips.
Mercifully, the Reckoner 102, like the Shreditor before it, doesn’t need to be skied upside down and backwards to be enjoyed. If you like a ski that’s playful, poppy and super simple to drift, it can serve as an all-mountain ski for someone who is aerially inclined. If you want to take your Pipe & Park skills to the sidecountry, the Reckoner 102 wants to come with you.
Head doesn’t tout its 2022/23 Kore collection as new, because they didn’t change its 2021/22 models, they just swaddled them all in a top layer of urethane, to make them more scratch-resistant. For the narrower Kores, which will be exposed to harsher shocks on the hard snow where they’ll spend much of their lives, the new coating definitely quieted the skis down a tad. So, we’re treating the 2023 Kores, including the 105, as new, even though Head does not.
While its speculation on my part, it’s possible the new urethane sheath made the 2023 Kore 105 ski better in shorter lengths. That was Jim Schaffner’s experience, as he skied the Kore 105 in both a 184cm and a 177cm. His report: “In the shorter size, I felt the 105 to have even greater range and playfulness than the 184. I must credit Head for delivering a ton of performance in the Kore line. With the exception of the 105, I skied all of the Kore models in the 177, and they all had amazing horsepower for a svelte 230 pounder like me.”
The Head Kore 105 is the perfect ski for our times. No, it doesn’t promote universal love and understanding among all people, but it does what it can, considering that it’s a ski. It’s not just that it’s the lightest ski in the genre, it’s how that light weight contributes to a quickness off the edge that makes the Kore 105 feel narrower than its actual dimensions.
Another reason that the Kore 105 behaves like a skinnier ski is it adheres to a metal-free diet; the absence of Ti laminates softens its torsional rigidity, enabling it to conform to terrain rather than attempting to subdue it. This business about feeling narrower matters because it makes it reasonable to consider the Kore 105 as an everyday ski for western resort skiing.
Its ultra-light weight also makes the Kore 105 an ideal in-resort/backcountry hybrid. The biggest concern any backcountry skier has about a super-light ski is that it will be great going uphill and suck on the way down, which sort of defeats the whole purpose. There’s zero chance the Kore 105 will flame out on the descent, as it’s far more substantial than any AT model of which I am aware.
Now that the Fischer Ranger series share a common construction, they also share a similar behavioral profile. Nothing affects a modern ski quite as much as the addition or subtraction of Titanal, so when Rangers were made both with and without Ti laminates, their performance profile would change radically from one model to the next. For 2023, Fischer homogenized the Ranger line by doling out a measure of metal in every model. By dint of its extra width, the Ranger 108 earns a mite more in its midsection, making it the smoothest Ranger in the new family.
The Ranger series has always been aimed squarely at off-trail skiing, where surface area dictates the degree of flotation which in turn has a direct bearing on how easy a ski is to swivel. News bulletin: skiing deep snow isn’t like skiing hardpack. Not just in the obvious way that snow you sink into and snow you can barely dent require different tactics, but in the subtle ways that deep snow affects stance and turn finish, which can’t be carved and therefore has to be swiveled to come across the fall line.
The point of the previous paragraph is that the wider the off-trail ski, the closer it inherently comes to optimizing its design, at least for the purposes of skiing powder, which is the only reason to own a Big Mountain model in the first place. If test conditions last winter had only cooperated, scores for the Ranger 108 would have shot up, elevating both its Power and Finesse rankings. Of all the new Rangers, the 108 was most compromised by inappropriate test conditions, yet its superior skill set was evident despite this considerable handicap.
Blessed with more flotation and power than its stablemate, the Ranger 102, the Ranger 108 delivers the sort of elite performance experts expect. When allowed to run across a field of syrupy corn snow, it’s a gas to lay over like its waist was 20mm thinner. Of course, connection at the top of the turn is inhibited by the usual steep front rocker and pulled-back contact point found in virtually every Big Mountain ski, but most of the Ranger 108 is in the snow and unperturbed by the jolts delivered by irregular terrain.
