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For those of you living in a box, the West has been getting crushed with snow the past few days. With snowfall totals totaling up to and over 80 inches over the past 72 hours in some places, and bases as deep as they’ve been all year, it’s time to break out the powder skis. Some of you less experienced riders may not even know that powder skis exist, or what exactly makes them different than the boards you already broke the bank to buy. The reality is, for the kind of snow we’re seeing now, powder skis are almost a necessity.

In short, powder skis are wider than your average ski, creating a surface that will tend to float on top of powder rather than sink, as most other skis will. This is useful not only for the unbelievable and hard to describe sensation of floating on your way down, but it’s also good for safety. I remember riding Mammoth a few years ago when it had snowed over 10 feet in less than 2 weeks and a skier actually died because he was skiing along and happened to fall forward in deep powder, causing him to suffocate to death. No joke. Obviously skiing with a partner is the smart thing to do, but with powder skis you’ll also do a better job of avoiding such a fall.

As skiing technology has evolved, so have the powder skis themselves. In the ‘07 – ‘08 season they were a handful of companies that designed what is called a “reverse camber ski”. The camber can be defined simply as the curvature of the base of a ski. Instead of the traditional ski curving to touch the snow, reverse camber bends away from the snow, making it much easier to ski the deep stuff…even moreso than with standard powder boards. This concept has been around for many years and is the basis for the construction of water skis, which are banana shaped (reverse camber) in order to float the tips. The original reverse camber ski was the Volant Spatula but although it had a cult-like following, other manufacturers never caught on and the idea faded away for a while. That’s until Shane McConkey switched to K2 and they released the Pontoon.

Now we’re seeing reverse camber skis from Armada, Line, Drake, DPS, and even Salomon but the question still remains, do they really help you ski powder better or not? Any takers?