It seems as if the people who make skis and boards are slipping on peels and going head over heels.
They're all taking traditional notions of how to make snowboards and skis and flipping them upside down, quite literally.
You're going to be hearing terms like "reverse camber" or "zero-camber" and "rocker" the next time you go to your favorite ski or snowboard shop, especially if you're a powder hound. So let us explain.
Traditionally, when you lay a ski or snowboard flat on its base, the tip and tail will be touching the ground, but not the middle � the place where you put your feet will be above ground to some extent.
This arc, or camber, harkens back to dark ages of skiing, when the standard method of changing direction was the parallel turn, which always reminded me of someone bouncing down the mountain with a pogo stick up his or her derriere. The camber shape was designed to spread the load over the length of the ski and provide a bit of spring to make the ski pop up for the turn.
Snowboards have always been built that way too, their makers figuring if it worked for skis, it must work too for a single plank, with the rider weighting the center of the board when entering a turn to get some pop on the transition.
Well, somebody � I don't know who � said, "Wait just a second, a snowboard is not a ski!"
Around the same time, some free-thinking big mountain free-skier said, "Wouldn't it be cool if the skis would ride on top of the pow and we didn't have to jackrabbit the turn?"
So they started making skis and boards bent the other way, with a "rocker."
One of the most colorful manifestations around here of this contrary philosophy is Peter Saari, a co-founder of Mervin, the formerly Seattle-based maker of Lib-Tech and Gnu snowboards.
"We've thrown the camber concept out completely and focused on bringing the area under your feet to life," Saari says. "Finally we have geometry designed around the sport of snowboarding."
Except that ski makers are adopting this rocker design as well, to varying extents, for their powder planks.
These new boards and skis are bent the other way, with the tips and tails higher than the waist, or built flat with "zero camber."
The idea is that you turn with your feet, so the area just below should make the most contact with the snow.
"Basically it makes the ski plane in powder snow," says Tim Petrick of K2, who helped design the company's new zero-camber Apache Coomba, a ski built in honor of the late big mountain skier Doug Coombs. "It's just much easier to float to the surface. The drawback, of course, is a reduction in hard-snow performance."
K2 also offers rockered skis � the Seth and the Pontoon. By and large, these are powder-focused rides, especially in the case of skis.
However, by adding a more pronounced arc in the side of the ski or snowboard � called a sidecut � as well as various methods of strengthening the tips and tails, both are said to turn as well on hardpack.
Saari goes even further when talking about Lib-Tech's new Skate Banana, the flagship of a line of snowboards with rocker shapes. He says they ride better everywhere on the mountain � in pow, on hardpack, around the park.
"When you put rocker in the board, you can ride a shorter board in powder and suddenly you can ride backwards in powder," he says. "When you're riding downhill you get full edge contact. When you get on boxes, the tips and tail are virtually catch-free. They're also a lot easier for beginners. It's a more intuitive turn; you just have to tip it.
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