Gear Reviews

The Best East Coast Powder Skis and the Dawn of Skibruary

It has been an historically snowy February for the Northeast, and I don’t think it’s a secret that things are deep just about everywhere north of Manhattan.  At some point it will stop snowing–it has to, of course.  No month can sustain this kind of pace.  But, adding in this past weekend’s New England blizzard, the projected winter snowfall total for Boston is now “Infinity.”

If this is how it compensates for its abbreviated length, then I say we make February even shorter.  Which is why I’ve been lobbying for the US government to adopt my experimental 13-month calendar, in which these weeks are set aside as the new month of “Skibruary.”  Congress hasn’t responded to my letters or phone calls, yet, but I’m now being followed by a large, unmarked black van–so I think I’ve got their attention.  That’s step one.

And we’ve already chosen a zodiac sign for Skibruary:  “Bearded Powder Monkey.”  Here’s one out in the wild:

Warning:  do not make eye contact with Dan.  He will take it as a sign of aggression.

With all this snow, surface conditions at our favorite New England resorts are outstanding, and coverage is wall-to-wall–just like the mural I painted in my bedroom of Abraham Lincoln fighting an army of robots.  It’s symbolic.  Anyway, I’m urging everyone in the Northeast to go skiing.  This has been a once-in-a-generation storm cycle, and the turns have been as good as you’ll ever see.

And, when skiing the conditions of a lifetime, you might as well be on the biggest planks you can find.  To help with that, what follows is an incomplete and semi-arbitrary list of our favorite powder skis for the upper-right portion of the country.  Keep in mind:  we’re all East Coasters here at Powder7, in some fashion or another.  So, while living in Colorado has turned us into insufferable Western powder snobs, we fully appreciate the virtues of skiing the east, and understand that a great fat ski for that terrain needs to be versatile enough for firmer stuff, too.

The 2015 Volkl Gotama.  Not the path to enlightenment, but a path to enlightenment.

(1) Volkl Gotama.  It’s been popular for a decade, it’s fully rockered, and it sometimes has a little cartoon Buddha on the topsheet.  What’s not to love?  The 107mm-waist and reverse camber shape float in the soft stuff, but the stout wood core will power through chopped up snow the day after a storm, too.  Pretty much what you’d expect from the signature pro model of Buddha.  If you want to go wider (and you should), then the 115mm-wide Volkl One is your ski.

The 2015 Rossignol Soul 7.  Voted America’s favorite inanimate object two years in a row.

(2) Rossignol Soul 7.  This ski debuted last winter and won, essentially, every magazine award including the Pulitzer Prize.  So there’s that.  It’s around 106mm wide, looks like a yellow highlighter marker, and is made from paulownia wood that is as close to weightless as wood can get.  It also makes a ripping lentil soup.  And for the deepest stuff?  The 114mm-ish wide Rossignol Super 7 is out there, with the same lightweight construction but a more plump footprint.

The 2015 Head Collective 105.  Does it kind of look like the Death Star?  Yes.  Does it ski like the Death Star?  Definitely, yes.

(3) Head Collective 105.  Like both of the previous skis, this thing features a full lightweight wood core and a playful flex for effortless surfy turns in untracked snow.  Unlike the other skis, its massive 146mm-wide tip is completely unsinkable and can be seen from space.  Probably.  I don’t know, I’ve never been.  If you want to go even bigger, the 115mm-wide Head Cyclic is better in every way except on firm groomers.  And firm groomers are for suckers.

The 2015 Icelantic Nomad RKR.  They’re kind of a big deal.

(4) Icelantic Nomad RKR.  Handmade in Denver from wood felled by a team of shamans (not fact-checked), the Nomad is crazy nimble in trees and tight spaces.  Rockered at the tip and tail for easy floatation, but cambered underfoot to grip variable snow, this ski is perhaps the most versatile on the list.  Plus, it has a mystical white buffalo on the topsheet this year.  Does it grant wishes?  I can’t guarantee that it doesn’t.

The 2015 Line Sir Francis Bacon.  Also pictured: the triangle from the album cover for Pink Floyds “Dark Side of the Moon.”

(5) Line Sir Francis Bacon.  Here are some things I believe about Elizabethan scientist Sir Francis Bacon.  He discovered bacon during a failed attempt to cure a pig from a witch’s hex.  Contrary to legend, he didn’t write any of Shakespeare’s plays, but he did write all of Steely Dan’s lyrics.  He wasn’t a man–he was actually a handful of dogs awkwardly wearing a giant overcoat.  Anyway, these skis are pretty awesome.

Those are our picks, Powder7 heroes.  Feel free to add your own suggestions in the comments.  I won’t read them, of course, but your words will live on forever, somewhere on the internets, to be cherished and curated by sentient computer viruses living as data scavengers among the smoldering ruins of our civilization.  And I will be their cyborg king.

Anyway, there’s more great, snowy weather on its way to the Northeast, and the snowsporting should continue to be fruitful.  So, while we wait for those favorable clouds to turn toward the Rockies, we hope our East Coast friends get out and enjoy it.  The turns in that part of the country have been hard to find fault with lately.

Long live Skibruary.

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