DPS Skis

Spoon Ski

Ticking off heli drops with an all-mountain ski on your feet is like going to a five-star restaurant and eating $40 soup with a fork: tasty, but you're totally missing the point. If your 96mm-underfoot boards are a fork, the DPS Spoon Ski is a ladle made of carbon fiber and 24-carat gold, an enormous and high-tech tool designed to devour the fancy bouillabaisse called "blower pow."

Before you get too excited, let's get one thing straight: if you're not being flown up to Alaskan summits, riding cats to the top of never-schralped lines, or getting dropped deep in interior British Colombia, the Spoon probably isn't the ski for you. Its massive 148mm underfoot girth is designed for one thing—surfing pure, untouched, chest-deep pow—and while the prepreg carbon-fiber laminate gives it a surprising amount of torsional stiffness, the Spoon isn't designed to blast through crud, rip variable conditions, or bust down groomers on its way back to the lift.

When you get a chance to see it in person, this specialization becomes pretty obvious; while it's recognizably a ski, the Spoon doesn't look much like anything else in your quiver. You might have other boards that are fully rockered, but you definitely don't have any that feature the same Convex 3D shovel, which is curved up towards the edges, similar to a boat hull, so you can plane over super-deep snow and make all kinds of slarvy turns and slashes without having to dig in an edge, get hung up, or dump speed. Combined with gently tapered Paddle Tech sidecut, highly beveled edges, and a squared-off pintail, this gives the Spoon an unbelievably smooth, surfy, and intuitive feel in snow so deep it would bury a giraffe, while maintaining the ability to pivot quickly and hit the brakes in a split second.

The one drawback of the Spoon's size its weight. Just kidding, actually at 190cm long and with a waist width of 148mm, a pair weighs under ten pounds, which means you could even take it for a tour if you had a mild deathwish and hip flexors of steel. DPS built the core from pure aspen, famous for its lightness and lively feel, and laminated it with pure prepreg carbon fiber to provide a hearty dose of stiffness, which is essential to prevent a ski this wide from feeling like a noodle. The sandwich layup adds a few ounces but sidesteps the flimsy feel that can plague cap-constructed skis, and the burly World Cup bases and 48 Rockwell steel edges slide like lightning and handle abuse without complaint (not that you're likely to encounter any rocks where you're going).