I grew up on water skis, cutting around buoys. (I also grew up laughing at what ‘powder skiing’ was at the time, all them cute little squiggles down a mountain.) Powder shares many attributes of a fluid, and virtually none of the characteristics of the world for which the <90mm waisted disasters known as skis back then were designed for.
Put simply, ski racing drove ski design for far too long. Shane McConkey may not have been the first to realize this, but he was certainly the first with a high enough profile and the credibility as a top level athlete to get a large ski manufacturer to pull their butts off of a slalom gate and produce something new.
Thanks, Shane.
I mention this bit of history that many of us already know because I think some of the lessons of the Spatula have been forgotten. There are so many skiers these days who never had a chance to ski those shiny, silver experiments, that’s it’s really a shame that the outer limits of certain design concepts aren’t known to them. The extremes of many skiers’ understanding of a full reverse sidecut, reverse camber (let’s just call it fully rockered) design hits the wall at some current hybrid shape, somewhere between a Spatula and a GS ski. Lots of skis are rockered to some degree, but how many are also truly tapered? When I say tapered, I mean: starting from the center of the ski and running an appreciable length down toward the tip and tail, and not merely 6 inches from the ends of the ski. (That taper, by the way, is how you get a drag free ski tip to keep from grabbing in heavy snow.)
Some skis are tapered, but how many are anywhere near a reverse sidecut, or at the very least close to reverse sidecut, which is to say, straight? (Even straight-ish is a better approach to powder and funky snow than any sidecut.) There are a few skis that come close by my estimations, but there are not enough.
Some companies are building rockered AND tapered skis that are pretty popular (I’m looking at you Armada JJ and Rossignol S7), but what’s with that pronounced deep curve right by the boot on the sidewall? Is all that really necessary?
It’s my firm belief that the popularity of these skis has everything to do with their leaning toward that general Spatula layout in powder snow, in spite of their clinging to some old modes of thinking, namely that ‘Well dude, we HAVE to have sidecut—how else you gonna turn!!?’
The best you know is the best you’ve ridden.
Sounds interesting. So it’s going to be narrower underfoot then? By how much? Around 110?
The ski will be narrower all around. Essentially about 15mm subtracted from every dimension of the current Praxis Protest. That equates to a 113mm waist.