The American skier’s ongoing infatuation with fat skis has so distorted our collective notion of what an all-terrain ski should look like that we no longer remember the days when the best skiers’ everyday ride was a race ski or something similar. As recently as the late 1990’s, a ski as wide as Dynastar’s Speed Zone 4×4 82 Pro would have been regarded as a powder-only behemoth.
Dynastar remembers that epoch because it helped re-define the all-terrain ski when it launched the original 4×4 in 1998. With a less exaggerated sidecut than the shaped skis of the era along with a wider waist, the first 4×4 was immediately recognized as a breakthrough ski in an all-mountain category that had previously been stocked with race ski spin-offs. I remember taking my first runs on them at a Solitude trade fair where I took them out first thing and never brought ‘em back. My belated apologies.
The all-new 4×4 is attached to the Speed Zone family, but it’s actually a separate breed. In keeping with the overall trend to lighter skis, the 4×4 82 Pro uses a multi-material core with laminated beech providing the primary structure and a band of polyurethane (PU) between the wood and the outer sidewall. The PU adds a dampening element as well as being lighter than the wood it replaces.
The Dynastar Legend W 84’s position at the top of our panel’s favorite Frontside Finesse skis of 2020 illustrates an interesting phenomenon that sometimes occurs when a brand uses the same ski for both men and women, particularly when said ski doesn’t use Titanal in its stock recipe. The women’s skis garner higher points than the men’s, as has been the case the last couple of years with Dynastar.
If you’re familiar with Dynastar’s recent history, then you know the Cham series was conceived as a freeride, off-trail family. Given its bloodlines, the Legend W 84 has no trepidation about traveling off-trail, where it’s better at drift across broken snow than most in the genre. When it’s confined to corduroy quarters, its user-friendly baseline allows it to pivot or carve on command, and its tidy turn radius (12m @ 156cm) creates a lovely short arc. As one tester noted last spring, it’s “easy to carve medium radius turns yet also easy (and fun) to make short turns.”
Ever since Dynastar introduced the Cham series what seems like several centuries ago, the brand has moved metal in and out its model matrix, trying to find the right fit for its 5-point sidecut design. It first offered a metal-laden option for the flagship Cham 97 and its bigger bros, the Cham 107 and even the Champ 117. It soon became apparent that all that massive material in a 117 was overkill, and gradually metal also disappeared from the 107mm-width and, in due course, the 97 as well.
When Dynastar resurrected a modified Cham baseline and sidecut in the form of the Legend X and Legend W series, to keep the wider skis’ weight down it cut the metal out of the 106 and reduced it to an insert in the 96. The 88 had the perfect dimensions to handle the weight of two sheets of Titanal without feeling like an oil tanker to turn. The added heft and unique damping qualities of this aluminum alloy keep the Legend W88 calm on both boilerplate groomers and bothersome crud.
The Legend W88 is a Power ski that accessible to Finesse skiers. It relatively short contact area makes it easy to foot-steer, it has sufficient width to float and drift in powder and it a technical skier should tip it on edge, she’ll have the support of Titanal to keep her carving on a clean trajectory.
One of my ardently held beliefs about ski design, for which I have no statistical support, is that every model family has a star, a width at which all its other design parameters are optimized. For example, in Salomon’s QST collection, it’s the 106; in Kästle’s MX family, it’s the 84, and in Dynastar’s 4-model Legend W series, it’s the 96.
What makes the W 96 the belle of the ball? The Legend W series is directly descended from Dynastar’s Cham clan, an early adopter of the 5-point sidecut. The 5-point sidecut keeps the tip and tail from engaging with the cambered zone underfoot, effectively keeping them out of the turning business and helping the skis to roll over terrain rather than digging into it. This shape was made expressly for Big Mountain skiing; it’s at its best when it’s wide, and a waist around 96mm is about as broad as it can be without feeling sluggish.
The fraternal relationship between Blizzard’s two All-Mountain East entries, the elder brother Brahma 88 and its upstart sibling, the Rustler 9, encapsulates the contrasting cast of characters that populate this crossroads category. While both skis belong to off-trail families, their personalities couldn’t be more different than, well, two brothers.
Put in Realskiers’ terms, the Brahma 88 is a Power ski while the Rustler 9 is a Finesse ski. The Brahma 88’s best scores are for performance criteria like carving accuracy and stability at speed; its GPA drops off for comfort qualities like forgiveness and low-speed turning. The Rustler 9’s marks reveal a model with a high aptitude for off-trail conditions with a peppy personality that’s easy to get along with. It’s not that it’s bad at edging, it’s just doesn’t care for the regimented lifestyle of a carving ski. It prefers life off-trail where it has the freedom to smear every turn.
