I’m a total beginner in powder so I was thinking I’d need a 165 – I’m 5′7″ and 150lbs, so the 165 comes to the tip of my nose.

Locally, I can only find the Voodoo in a 175. I see 3 options, which would be best???

1] buy the 175… but I’m worried it is too big/hard to manuever for me
2] go for a 165 Havoc which is available
3] special order the 165 Voodoo

Thanks,
Peter

I skied on the Black Diamond Voodoos last winter as well, with Dynafit bindings.

Prior to the voodoos, I had a pair of Hagan Titanal skis – for me, I found that this skis didn’t have the flotation I was looking for in powder, they didn’t have the stiffness for awkward conditions, nor did they have the sidecut for tight turns in bushy trees (I live in British Columbia). The voodoo addressed every one of these issues for me, and I found it to be a great ski. The stiffness took a bit of getting used to, and I found I had to push the skis into the turn on hardpack.

On the topic of twintips – I don’t like them. The fact that you can’t easily stab a ski into the snow and use it as an anchor is a real inconvenience for ski mountaineering. As Lou pointed out, the twintips do feel different at the end of a turn – they seem to slide out of the turn more than I’d like – I’d prefer if it was a bit more “grabby”. (of course, this is just my personal observation – your mileage will differ!)

Finally, on the topic of quality … I had the exact same experience as freeheel above – the top sheet has been falling apart on the tails where the skins clip on. The skis look pretty beat up after just one year of skiing. I’ll contact BD about that and possibly return ‘em. Also, I found that the boot center mark did not align with the “true’ boot center (which was marked with a separate score). Caused some confusion for me with my ski tech.

All in all, I found the Voodoos to be great skis – if BD would ditch the twintips and improve the quality of the tail skin clips, it would be great.

This was my first pair of twin tips and I found that feature really annoying. Since I don’t do any backward skiing I’ll avoid twin tips in the future.

Towards the end of winter, I noticed that on both skis the topsheet was delaminating from the tail of the ski. Not sure why this was happening esp since due to the twin tip I would not stick my ski tails into the snow like I usually would while getting ready to put skins on. Anyway I sent the skis into BD for evaluation and they promptly sent me a new pair. I’ve always had great customer service from BD. By this time next season I’ll know if my pair was a dud or if this problem is more widespread.

In any event for future ski purchases I’ll avoid twins and I think I will look for a ski with a tail that ends with a plastic plug instead of having the base material, topsheet, and edges extend completely to the tail of the ski.

The one other thing I noticed was that on my Voodoos the bases would dry out extremely fast, more so than on any other ski I’ve owned. This suprised me again and again since I mainly skied powder conditions thanks to last seasons excellent snowfall here in CO. The dry spots would always show first on the back half of the ski along both edges. This made me wonder if the base material was especially thin and couldn’t hold as much wax? I think maybe the skis were not flat out of the factory and BD ground them down to flatten them, leaving the base material extra thin along the edges of the back half of the ski.

That said, Mitch is writing that the boots have much softer metatarsal flex. That might be great for telemarking, but will make them much less useful for snow climbing and such. One reason people have gotten away with using tele boots as alpine mountaineering boots is that they’re actually quite stiff even though they’ve got a bellows.

When that changes all bets are off. Imagine trying to kick steps using boots with the flex of a tennis shoe? You can do it provided you’ve got enough athletic skill and fitness, but why add a handicap like that?