Ladies looking to carve clean and round turns all day long should definitely check this one out. Dynastar’s all-new E-Cross 82 is a great choice for advanced skiers who spend most of their time in an on-trail format. By blending a smooth ride with a fun-loving shape, the E-Cross82 is a highly useful ski that can hold up to moderately aggressive skiing in a shorter radius format. There’s been a pretty solid move lately to shorter turns in skis, and this E-Cross is a great example of that. Many skiers enjoy having the wider shovel, narrower tail, and grippy waist for on-trail performance with a versatile character. If we’re being honest with ourselves as skiers, we all spend most of our time on groomed terrain, so it behooves us to have skis that are aligned with the conditions that we find ourselves in most of the time. Quick and agile, yet smooth and powerful, the Dynastar E-Cross 82 is an awesome all-mountain ski that has strong front side characteristics.

In the E-Cross 82, it all starts with Dynastar’s new Hybrid Core 2.0. This futuristic sounding build starts with a poplar core with three directions of wood fiber. Rather than using a lot of glue to adhere different stringers of wood together, Dynastar mills and joins their wood laminates together using friction and pressure. We’re getting interlocking laminates of wood to give the ski a unique feel and a good sense of power while the hybrid aspect of the ski uses polyurethane along the sides of the ski. This PU material gives the ski a smooth and silent character, and it complements the energy and pop of the bonded poplar laminates. On top of the core, we get a unidirectional fiberglass laminate and an H-Tech layer. This upper layer provides more power with the arms, keeping the forebody and tail of the ski firmly planted on the ground and ready for the next turn. In the 167, the ski sits on the scale at 1500 grams per ski, which is on the light side—one of the benefits of having a ski with PU and a lack of adhesive.

The shovel stands out as the overarching aspect of the shape, as the 129 mm tip is pretty wide for a ski this narrow underfoot. This leads to strong initiation, and it’s a good thing the ski has enough torsional stiffness to generate those higher edge angles in the turn. At 82 mm underfoot in the 167, the ski is very agile and quick from edge to edge, with the drop in taper being substantive enough to make for more of a pin tail style of ski. That is, wherever you point it, it’ll go, and it won’t hook up in the back side when pushed. The ski is a lot smoother in this manner. That same 167 produces a 13-meter turn radius, so it’s on the short side for an all-mountain ski. With minimal rocker in either the tips or the tails, this E-Cross 82 feeds off the long camber underfoot. With the long camber we get a long effective edge. With the increased contact in the snow, we’re getting a smoother feel overall. This pairs well with the build to provide a unique ski experience for on-trail carving and some off-piste adventures.

Best when used by advanced skiers, this E-Cross 82 also has intermediate accessibility to it. That mostly comes in the form of quickness due to the waist. You don’t have to rail carved turns to enjoy the full scope of performance in the ski, giving it a nice range for skier styles and levels. We thoroughly enjoyed our time this past year on the new E-Cross 82, as it brings to light the need for and usefulness for a ski like this.