![]() ![]() But people are drawn to powder skis even on days when they’d be better equipped on their thinner-waisted sisters, in part because ski magazines and their Instagram feeds feature pros in powder on powder skis. Powder skis, he says, are a specialized tool, just like skinny skis. “They’re trying to manifest their season,” says Mike Rogge, an editor at Mountain Gazette magazine and a former editor at Powder.īut people are drawn to powder skis even on days when they’d be better equipped on their thinner-waisted sisters, Rogge said, in part because ski magazines and their Instagram feeds feature pros in powder on powder skis. Skis with this geometry, McConkey proved, rip in powder, and that’s why you see iterations of these obese boards today beneath the feet of so many skiers, even when the snow is firm. McConkey’s skis were shaped in precisely the opposite dimensions of every other ski at the time: they had fat waists, a reversed sidecut, and zero camber. The rest of the pros on the trip were flailing, but he was flying, and his performance blew the industry away. In 2001, he tried out the first prototype in New Zealand on wet, heavy snow. He reversed the historic trend of manufacturing skis with more sidecut and camber when he sketched a design for the first true powder skis, the Volant Spatulas, on a bar napkin in 1996. Shane McConkey (may he rest in peace) was the harbinger. ![]() For two decades now, the American skier has been irrationally gripped with powder fever. That day I had on powder skis by East Coast standards, that were 98 millimeters underfoot. ![]() I started sliding fast and I couldn’t get my skis to bite, so I summoned all my animal instincts to keep them below me, where they scuffed the bumpy ice and regulated my descent to the little tree downhill and the big cliff beyond. When I jump-turned down into the slope, though, my skis blew right out from under me on one of those damn bumps. They looked like toy ships on uncertain seas-heaving starboard, falling portside, too much in the bow, sinking in the stern-but they didn’t capsize. ![]() Peppered in little bumps, like the bumps that stood on my forearms when later I told people what happened last spring on the summit of the tallest mountain in Vermont. When I say the skiing was icy, I don’t mean your standard East Coast edge-skittering hardpack. ![]()
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