TELEMARKTIPS.COM - January 2005
January, 2005 -- We've spent more than a dozen days on the Revs now, at the ski area as well as touring for backcountry turns. In that time we have been fortunate to experience everything from waist-deep, light powder to hardpack, and almost everything in between. We've broken trail in up to a foot of fresh and racked up many, many thousands of vertical feet off the top of our local area's 11,053 foot summit.
The Reverends are wood core skis with a vertical sidewalls, tapering to cap construction near the tips and tails. This approach to sidewall design attempts to combine the superior edge hold characteristics of a vertical sidewall ski, with the torsional rigidity of a cap ski at the ends where its needed most. G3 builds the Reverends using tri-axial braided glass cloth and sintered P-tex 6000 bases.
The Revs are medium stiff, a little stiffer than Karhu Jaks, but close in stiffness to the Rossi Bandit XXX/T4. Flex is quite round, but to us it felt as though the tails were a little more stiff than the ski forebody, giving the Revs a nice, predictable amount of snap out of the turn.
We tested the 185 model and for their length and dimension they were surprisingly faster edge to edge than other skis in their class. This is likely due to the Reverends relative lightweight for its type: a half pound lighter per pair than 180 Jaks, and three quarters of pound lighter than Rossi's T4.
With 33 millimeters of sidecut, the Reverends walk the line very well between between too much and too little. One of the criticisms we had of the T4s last year was, that with just 28 millimeters of sidecut, they required a lot more foot steering, and were considerably more work than what we were used to. Not so the Revs, these are easy turning skis that love to make medium to short radius turns, but with a wide-cut tail that lets you out of the turn nicely, without ever getting hooky.
In powder we found the Revs to be equally at home making long, surfy turns, tracking confidently down the mountain. As would be expected from a ski of its size, the Reverends have lots of float, giving the rider that deep powder sensation, even in the not-so-deep. G3 ski designer Paul Parker has found a nice balance of weight-to-stability with the Revs. As indicated above, they are not as heavy as most of skis in their class but they lose none of the stability usually associated with heavier boards. These skis really shine in untracked fluff, but stick with you later in the day as the mountain gets cut up. Backcountry variable snow performance was equally as impressive.
Hardpack? Well, that's not really what the Rev is all about, but like some other the top of the line way-fat skis, they do a pretty decent job with a little feathering at the end of the turn and with big boots. The Jaks were the first really fat tele boards to demonstrate that skis of this type could be versatile enough to be used as a one-ski quiver, but based on our experience the Reverends have the edge in hardpack performance.
These are big boards designed to be ridden hard, so most skiers will probably want to match them with big boots, though in the backcountry we found plenty of love driving the Revs with Garmont Syner-Gs. They were enough boot, but we would not recommend going to a much lighter model, even for longer tours. The Reverends are a ski that you will naturally want to be aggressive with, and boots that can keep up would seem mandatory. One other note: the tips of the Revs are fairlry low profile, yet we had no trouble breaking trail in fresh snow. Their tips are so broad that they ride up and over the snow quite nicely.
Conclusion: Well, what can we say? A solid two-tips up for the Reverends. These skis were a bit of a surprise. With the Paul Parker connection, we went into the testing cycle of all the new G3 skis expecting, maybe subconsciously at least, boards that would resemble in some way the late Tua line that never made it to the shelves, nope, not at all. Not even close. The Reverends are far and away superior in every way to anything Parker has been connected with previously, raising the bar across the board on this class of ski. Frankly, we were most surprised by the maturity (for lack of a better word) of the entire line, but particularly the Reverends They just don't feel at all like anybody's first-year line.
Versatile, confident and a hell of a lot of fun, right out of the box G3 has gone and produced a strong candidate for fat tele ski of the year. The Reverends are nothing less than a triumphant return for Paul Parker, as well as a startlingly sweet entry into the world of ski manufacturing for Oliver Steffen and the G3 crew.