Head Skis USA

Venturi 95 Ski

The first thing you, and everyone else, will notice when checking out the Head Venturi 95 Ski is the space-age-looking doodads at the tip and tail. If you want to drop some knowledge on the clowns that are giving you a hard time for skiing on kitchen utensils, tell them it's an elastomeric stabilizing inlay with a glass fiber exoskeleton, designed to dampen the vibration found in rockered tips and tails while increasing torsional strength and reducing swing weight. If you want them to understand what that means, sit them down and make them watch while you rip the headwall of the off-the-summit groomer, duck into the trees and surf through your favorite powder stash, and poke out a steezy spin over the cat track at the bottom of the hill.

The Venturi can do all of these things partly because of the aforementioned TTS, or tip and tail stabilizer system, which gives the ski its distinctive look, but there's also a host of other features that make it a versatile all-mountain destroyer, like TNT rocker, which has 60% camber underfoot and 20% rocker in the tip and tail, allowing you to rip groomers and schralp pow with equal aplomb. The rockered tips and tails help you float and smear, while camber works with the stability provided by the TTS system to lock edges into hardpack. You might think all this fancy tech would make the Venturi a delicate museum-piece of a ski, but you couldn't be more wrong. It's built with a super-durable sandwich cap construction, which combines the toughness and strength of sandwich construction with the lightweight simplicity of a cap overlay, and burly ABS Tuffwall sidewalls that are designed to take a beating without dulling or blowing out. Throw in tough and fast diecut UHM C bases, and the mountain doesn't stand a chance.