BC Ski Review: Dynafit Stoke

 
There’s a couple of things you can tell about the Stoke right off the bat. With a 105mm waist (174 cm length) it was clearly built for the North American backcountry market where obesity has become hip, or at least popular unless you consider epidemics to be the result of choice. Yet for a fat ski, it is merely full bodied, not flabby.

Dynafit Stoke - $800 - 130-105-125

The other is that as a light ski, it can’t throw the heavy punches you need to dominate hard, and certainly not glazed snow. Provided you can hold an edge, the Stoke can get you down the hard snow, but it takes softer snow to change that grimace of concentration to a smile of exhilaration. Which is where the Stoke stokes your fun meter the best. It is made to let you harvest as many soft snow turns as you can earn the vertical for, so its lightweight becomes a competitive advantage when you’re logging lots of vertical.

Aiding the efficiency of the uphill is an early rise tip, helping the Stoke to float to the surface when breaking trail. Of course, that also helps with making fresh tracks on the down too, something it needs to balance an overall stiff flex. The stiffness derives from a wood core of paulownia wood with stringers of bamboo and beech wood surrounding isocore for longitudinal stiffness without adding too much weight. Torsionally the ski is fairly stiff too, which allows it to hold an edge, but the early rise tip robs the ski of overall edge contact making it less than inspiring at speed on ice.

For 90% of the conditions where you would want to be logging max vertical in the backcountry, the Stoke is an excellent weapon for harvesting freshies. On steep couloirs or in-bounds crud I’d want something with more bite and muscle, but for the backcountry, where we’d rather be, the Stoke is a great choice. Just don’t bother mounting anything other than techfiddle bindings. Otherwise the weight savings will be lost.

Dynafit
Stoke
Price: $800

 
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