This season Dynastar debuts the most significant changes to its core collection of Freeride skis since the Chamonix valley brand launched the first version of the Cham design in 2012. The new Freeride family has three branches: M-Pro, four flat-tailed all-terrain models; M-Tour, a 99mm backcountry board; and M-Free, a pair of twin-tips made to surf big lines on big mountains. The emerging stars of the 20/21 line are the M-Pro 99 and the subject of this review, the M-Free 108, which bedazzled the few lucky enough to essay it last winter.
No question that the M-Free 108 is built to butter around in deep powder. It uses a shallow sidecut to minimize sinkage, along with tapered tips and tails that shorten the platform underfoot. This makes it a brilliant drifter that can be swiveled in a phone booth (remember those?). Its hybrid core uses poplar down the center and a swath of PU on either side to dampen the ride without impinging its lively response to pressure.
Theron Lee, a longtime Dynastar fan, found the M-Free 108 to be “very damp and smooth but with great rebound. Easy to turn and stable at speed. Very playful yet has plenty of power. Skis kinda short.” Every behavior cited by Lee can be traced to the M-Free 108’s abbreviated but responsive center section buffered by twin-tipped extremities that are tapered and rockered out of the way.
A point of interest to a ski design nerd like your Editor is that the M-Free 108 gets so much out of a simple construction and dimensions that hark back to the earliest days of shaped skis in the 1990’s. A 30mm drop between tip width and waist is so traditional in this genre it might as well be considered a standard with only minor deviations from this norm in our 2021 round-up of Big Mountain boards. A 10mm taper between tip width and tail is another rule of thumb that the M-Free 108 conforms to.
The only Finesse attribute of the M-Free 108 that isn’t off the charts is its facility at short turns, not surprising for a 108 with a 18m sidecut radius in a 182cm. Of course in powder, its preferred playground, drifting is a more useful than carving, and its eminence at smearing makes short work of short turns without ever trying to find an edge.
Note that there are no women’s versions of the M-Free models as the design requirements for the fairer sex and those for off-trail skis overlap, making a women’s model moot. The M-Free 108 is not only gender neutral; it also doesn’t discriminate on the basis of age. Because it makes powder skiing absurdly simple, we award the M-Free 108 a Silver Skier Selection.
