2021 ARMADA DECLIVITY 92 TI SKI REVIEW
Armada has come a long way over the years. Gone are the days when the company was just a manufacturer of twin-tipped park skis. Especially in recent years, we’ve seen some impressive new developments from the brand with their directional skis. We’ve talked in-depth about the Tracer line and its lightweight, freeride performance. Now, we have a new collection of directional skis from Armada to talk about, Declivity.
This new collection of skis is designed to fulfill the demands of a modern resort-based skier, and one that specifically prefers high speeds, carving, and firm snow performance. The inspiration from this line comes from the Declivity X, Tof Henry’s ripping big mountain skis found in the Armada ZERO series. That design and resulting performance has been tweaked into 3 new skis, the Declivity 102, 92, and 82 Ti. Today, we’re going to talk about the 92, which is arguably the most versatile of the bunch.
All three of these skis essentially share the same recipe, although their shapes change slightly as you move through the line. They all have a rocker/camber/rocker profile, but the wider skis have more pronounced rocker, and throughout all three, there’s substantially more rocker in the tip. The wider skis also use earlier taper. The 102 has a long, smooth, straight tip. The 82 could almost be described as extended sidecut, as the widest point of the tip is almost at the very end of the ski. The 92 falls right in between with some subtle early taper and relatively minimal tip rocker. Construction is where things start to get pretty interesting. To start, they all use a Caruba wood core. Caruba is 15-20% lighter than poplar but holds many of the same properties when it comes to performance. It’s also a very sustainable material, requiring just 5 years from seed to harvest. Yay sustainability! That wood core is sandwiched together with full vertical sidewalls (Armada calls it AR100 Sidewall) and two sheets of metal. In the tip of the ski, that metal has vertical cut-outs filled with an elastic compound. The slits in the metal are designed to actually take away some torsional stiffness in that portion of the ski. That allows you to enter a turn more easily as the ski can twist more freely right at the tip. As you’re pulled into a turn, the elastic compound compresses, harnessing energy, then releasing it as you exit the turn. In other words, the idea is to give the ski easy turn initiation without taking away its responsiveness, edge grip, power, and snappy feel into the next turn.
So, that’s the idea behind these new skis, but does it work? Simply put, yes, and it’s really cool. Let’s start with carving performance on firm snow as I think that’s what most people are wondering about. It is a very versatile ski, which we’ll get to, but when Armada puts “Serious Frontside Ambitions” in the subtitle of the ski, we’re going to talk about serious frontside ambitions. This is a pretty unique ski. One of the first things I noticed was the weight. It’s significantly lighter than other skis in this category with 2 sheets of metal (thanks Caruba!). That’s sometimes a slightly nerve-wracking feel on a ski that’s designed for high performance carving, to be perfectly honest. A lightweight ski often doesn’t have the stability or doesn’t track as well as a carving enthusiast would want. Somehow, in the Declivity, it doesn’t matter. One of my favorite, and my first at Stowe, runs on the Declivity was down Hayride. Hayride is an old race trail with plenty of pitch, but also some flatter sections. You also get a few hundred yards of an easy cruiser on your way to it. During my first turns on that cruiser I thought, “hey, these are quite fun!” They feel snappy, energetic, and fun on terrain like this.
As I tipped into a steeper section of Hayride and let the ski run a little, my thoughts went from “hey fun!” to “holy crap” pretty fast. They still feel relatively lightweight, but they grip like crazy when you’re in a turn. They also have a super smooth feel when linking turns, and I give a lot of credit to the Articulated Titanal Banding. It’s one of those skis that feels like they installed shock absorbers into the tip. It eats up variations in the snow surface and links carving turns with ease. It’s not a super-stiff flex; there are definitely stiffer skis in this category, so it doesn’t quite have a race-like feel, but that’s perfectly fine with me. I never felt a limit to its edge grip and am perfectly happy skiing something that’s not as stiff as a board. Armada rates their flex pattern at about a 7 out of 10, which makes sense to me. After Hayride, I moved over to Liftline, which is the steepest, most direct groomed trail at Stowe. You can knock off just under 2,000 vertical feet in about 60 seconds if you’re up for it. Liftline is a great place to test skis like this. It’s one of the best trails in the country to test edge grip thanks to its pitch and generally firm conditions, but it’s also a good place to test relative forgiveness. Get going too fast, or get too locked into a turn, and bad things can happen. This is where I really started to develop a sense of what this ski can do. My favorite thing about it is the way it can hold an edge through just about anything, but also release that turn pretty easily. This is a valuable characteristic on a trail like Liftline as you can integrate subtle skidding or drifting into your turns. You can also just flick them to the side if you need to dump speed more quickly, which isn’t a common characteristic in a 2-sheets-of-metal-90-mm ski.
That ability to release the tail edge and the fact that the flex pattern won’t kill your knees really boosts its versatility around the rest of the mountain too. Among skis with two sheets of metal in this width range, the Declivity 92 is easily putting itself among top contenders for “most versatile.” You can flick it around through trees, the tip isn’t going to buck you if you stuff it into a mogul on a zipper-line, and they’re also not a fatiguing ski because of the weight. As someone who spends a lot of time on twin tips, I’m actually looking forward to more days on the Declivity 92 Ti as I feel like I can still play around on it, but if I want to go rip some turns with the ex-racer crowd at Stowe, I’ll have an appropriate tool.
All things considered, this is an awesome new ski, and an awesome collection in general. It’s replacing the Invictus line from Armada, and I think they’ve taken overall performance, quality, and feel to a whole new level. I also love the sleek graphics, which is not something we’re accustomed to seeing from Armada (pretty sure Henrik’s new ski has a goblin on it?). The graphics correspond to the ski’s performance perfectly, and we imagine you’re going to see a good amount of sleek, mostly black Armadas on the slopes next season.
