Best skis for powder?

By Sam Masters

The best skis for powder are whatever you’re clamped into on a powder day.

Seriously? You want instruction on what works best for the most consistent, coveted, storied, and desired snow of all? Any solid skier will make light work of pow on pretty much any ski. Sorry.

The problem is, as always, getting to the powder. Navigating the variable, crusty, inconsistent, and wind-stripped faces is what makes skiing, well, not tennis. This goes a long way to explaining why skiers spend so much time talking about the perfect powder ski…

At most ski resorts on most powder days, you are usually only gonna get one straight-down no-tracks hero run. After that it is all about the ugly traverse, the difficult entry, the wavy wind chop, and the icy straight-line. Even the most legendary powder fields can have a narrow choke point that invariably gets scraped and polished to blue ice. It’s a pleasing irony that the ultimate powder ski needs to hold an edge in tight slalom turn occasionally.

Although rarely mentioned in the brochure, even heliskiing is not always perfect. On a long run expect to hit variable snow at lower elevations, and funky snow anytime. For some reason the average heliskiing punter is reluctant to mention this in their social media posts. There is a special kind of shame reserved for those who spend that much money, burn that much carbon, and get taken for that kind of mug.

It's a minor miracle that this pseudo expert wrote four paragraphs about the perfect powder ski before mentioning fat skis.  It takes more, however, than plain girth. You need dampening for the icy traverse track, rock solid stability so you can drive the ski through the crud, and predictable flex to stomp the landing. (Everyone gets air on a powder day – even if it’s just that weightless millisecond between turns).

Ski width remains a rolling controversy. Fatter is better: with 125mm+ under foot every day is bottomless. Since peak fatness in the mid noughties, ski width has reduced; to allow more trickery, to reduce manufacturing costs, and to allow Gen Z to wallow in the pow like an extra on the Blizzard of Ahhhs. There is such a thing as being plain, dumb wrong however. Anyone who rocks less that 110mm on a powder day has reserved one of the less fashionable, lower planes of Hell for an eternity of dry slope skiing.

What about rocker? Sure – this will make things easier for almost any skier in the soft stuff. The era of hyper-aggressive rocker angle that starts either side of the binding is over. Banana skis are impractical in the frozen jungle of your average powder day. Keep it tidy with modest rocker angle closer to the tips. For the cheapskates: tense your core, lift your toes, and go gorilla for free extra rocker on any ski.

I wish I could say that your next powder day will resemble your social media feed. Regrettably real skiing (like real life) is a relentless compromise between effort and expense, adventure and comfort, experience and luck. A wide all-round ski will work best when you understand and accept that reality (variable snow) intrudes on even the best powder day.