A few days ago, following a substantially new snowfall, I was sitting on the chairlift, next to a young man equipped with a strange pair of skis. Long, wide and with what could be called a “negative sidecut”, meaning that instead of having a narrow waist, that ski had a wide one, as shown on the photo.
This ski had been produced by Salt Lake City’s DPS, now a popular specialty ski brand, founded in 2005 by Stephan Drake. DPS is an acronym for Drake PowderworkS.
In the early 2000s Drake wanted to create a ski that could float on top of powder while at about the same time, the late extreme skier Shane McConkey was shaking up his own ski design—the Volant Spatula—with Peter Turner, who eventually ended up joining forces with Drake to turn their outlandish dreams into reality, pioneering one of the first rockered skis ever made, the Wailer.
The skis I saw were some discontinued 2016 Lotus model, about 140 mm wide underfoot and really not made for skiing on powder sitting on hard-pack like the 10 inches (25 cm) we had that day, but that needed true “bottomless” powder to be used.
I didn’t envy my chairlift companion for trying to torture what amounted to “2x4” into a rounded turn under the circumstances, but again, innovation in skiing has always belonged to those brave spirits willing to try!
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