Jonny

Yeah, well, I'm screwed. American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge just hired me for Paradise Lost. I start next Tuesday. Might get the odd ride in on Mondays back home or midweek at Wachusett, if I feel like tempting fate...

Your helmet is nowhere near as good as you hope it is. If you hit something hard like a lift tower at speed it's basically as good as a thick hat. It's QUITE good at preventing minor injuries but doesn't do much for the ones which result in major damage. The bad news is that making it better (basically making it a high-end motorcycle helmet) reduces the likelihood of brain damage but increases the likelihood of neck injuries, so it's a trade-off.

Crazy, bro - audition Monday, callback for that and two other auditions tuesday, now an audition for something ELSE today, so I'm heading back down shortly. All a little stressful even for someone who's been at it a while - think of the first run at a new hill with a bunch of carvers you don't know. You know your skills, but what if you sketch one right into the woods off the lift? Tough, because I know that if I get any of these I'm pretty much done riding for the year, but how'm I gonna pay for lift tix if I don't??? Fun times at B-E on Sunday. Next time I'll bring my backup SL board for you to fool around on.

An Alp isn't really a slalom board - more of a soft-snow all-mountain stick. A true SL board will indeed be pretty stout, well suited to hammer the edge hard and get off it quickly rather than for riding elongated arcs. If you pick up an SL board designed for a lighter rider it can do well as a freeride board. On icy days I'll take out an Oxygen 158 - nowhere near stout enough for me to race at my 220lb, but it turns tightly and can be stretched out to doing some longer-radius turns also. Still enough pop to blast me into the air on a hard cross-under.

Boots first, making sure they're SMALL enough. Then blow some serious bux on custom insoles. Then a board from the classifieds. Then maybe F2 step-ins. That's a pretty good binding and can be resold if you want to move up in solidity to Bombers or Cateks for instance. Without well-fitting boots it's all worthless, though, 'cause you won't get enough runs in.

Don't really use it as a stomp-pad, but it's essential as a scraper for a Catek/intec setup.

What a great hill that Berkshire East is - lots of width, decent variety, very moderate crowds, smooth pitch with width which is all too rare, and a clientele and teaching staff which doesn't just tolerate hardbooters but goes out of its way to show its appreciation of them. Bob, Kevin and I had a terrific day there today, maybe clinic-ing a little but mostly grooving on each others efforts. I'm going to be one crippled cowboy tomorrow, but happy now. Looking forward to another expedition there...

Cool - see you then. Might be a little crust in the AM, then softening up...

Tough on a narrow stick. I keep a Burton Alp for those days. I think the big trick is to keep it mostly downhill as much as possible, stand a little straighter with less edge in the turns, really loose lower body, and use the occasional clearing to check your speed and line

60-60 on both my 18cm boards. I've been as high as 66-63 and was even 60-66 for one demented day riding with a euro-trained maniac. Catek step-ins with a fair amount of toe lift on the front and even more heel lift on the back, very slight inward cant on both and a fairly wide stance. It's not a particularly good setup for skidding around in a crowd and it's plumb awful for riding switch, but on moderate terrain it's very comfortable and balanced. The key deal for me is to have my heelside and toeside turns feel more or less equally locked in and fluid. If I go too low with my back foot then toeside feels great - like a bottom-turn on a windsurfer - but with my limited flexibility I can't really carve heelside on hard snow without sticking my butt out. If my quiver and budget allowed more riding out west I'd set up in the mid-50s on something around 22.

Very true, and in my 24 years of riding I've had exactly ONE lesson, an informal one, from a guy on a hill where he wasn't an instructor but was the best rider on the hill so the ski-school sort of winked at the whole deal - PSR in fact. None of the guys wearing a Stratton jacket thought he was undercutting them. I've been away from the sport for a while, but it seems to me that the vibe used to be maybe a little more casual - guys with an extra clue shared with guys who might have been short of one in some area. A one-upsmanship contest like that going on among some of the dudes on this DB would have been inconceivable - we would have mocked them into invisibility. In any event, any fee at all would make lessons an economic absurdity for me - since it's not a great year for the Theatre professional (most years aren't). But barter still works great, and if I can repay a favor with ski-lessons, or golf lessons or clubs, or theatre tix, why that will obviously happen.

Saturday AM looks good - where and when?

Love to join in whenever I can - this weekend happening?

Funny. I got started building golf clubs the same way - messing with board repairs. Eventually I got as far as building a full board - kind of an airplane wing hollow design - marine 1/8" plywood over spruce forms and stringers, with two layers of S glass and a layer of Kevlar vacuum-bagged over it all. double-concave 9' 8" pintail slalom board under 20lb, which was pretty good, I thought, for a first try. The mastfoot was way further forward than it would be now, but it really sailed well, especially to weather. The only problem was that in chop the hollow board sounded like bouncing a cello down the stairs!

Hot Logical from 1990 or so. Grey with the Mondrian-like graphics. Pretty beat up heelside... My main ride is getting on in years actually - Coiler RC180 from 2002

Mastfoot still tight on that stocker? Did it have the daggerboard you had to sling over your shoulder downwind? Mine's long gone, but I still have somewhere a 1981 Wayler YPSI (Young Person's Sailing Instrument - the Dutch can be a little geeky... The window of the sail (6.3sqm and huge for the time) said " Shake hands with the devil")

Probably not what you want to ask yourself, but did you ever leave them anywhere near a heat source such as a radiator, fireplace, baseboard or compact electric heater. Any of those could cause cracking and eventual catastrophic failure.

LOL - no, red Coiler at Butternut today. Working on tomorrow, so we'll see...

Pardon me if this is old hat to you, but it sounds like it might not be: Take the liners out of the current shells and just put your bare feet into the shells. Then slide your foot forward until your toes are pressing against the front of the shell. Now check how much room there is between your heel and the inside of the boot's heel. You want NO MORE than two fingers' width of air there - less would be better. If you're a 12.5 and wearing 29.5 Heads my guess is that they're at least a size too big (I wear 11.5 Wide street shoes and 27 Mondo ski and snowboard boots - both with custom liners). Lots of people wear too-big boots and find them too tight, because A) They have them cranked way up to try to make up for the slop, and/or B) the geometry of the boot doesn't match up with the geometry of the foot - widest spot is too far forward, usually, and the ankle's off too. So, I'm betting that smaller shells would be GREAT, but can't say whether the liners will work in them. Thermo - fitted liners most likely would, with a re-cook. Once your feet are in the right size shell, you get to find out what real support is like. You'll buckle much looser but feel much more secure.

I have a 6 - same vintage as the 7 posted above. The handle on one of the plates' toe-bail needs some babying, but it's certainly rideable. I''ll take some pix if you need them.

Aaaahh - fooey. The yellowjacket was way out of line. Fin was doing what any good rider would have done since boards first got bindings, and what good skiers have done routinely as long as I've been skiing (50 years next year). He was boogieing down the extreme edge of the trail, in predictable rhythm, slightly faster than the traffic but no threat to anyone. On the contrary, he was an inspiration - any beginner on any kind of sliding device would have looked over and thought "how do I learn to do that?" I remember that moment in my own life very well - about 9 years old and way out of my depth up on Castlerock at S-Bush, 1964 or so. Two instructors - one in the supervisor's jacket - came down the extreme left side, one after another, in a tight Wedeln, in the only really clean snow on the slope. That image stuck in my imagination, fueled, if I'm completely honest, by resentment as well as admiration until the time I could do it myself. BTW - the lead skiier turned out to have been Pepi Stiegler, and getting to free-ski with the guy some twenty years later (still couldn't keep up) is one of the highlights of my life on snow.

That's cool, James - I'll try to catch up with you there. Most likely on Friday eve - I hate riding weekends. Had a blast at Butternut today - great snow and no crowds to speak of, and I like the very mellow terrain. Somehow didn't see the only other hardbooter on the hill until it was almost time for me to leave - very smooth riding woman on a classy big Donek. Patty, IIRC.

Never skied or ridden Berkshire East but it looks like a much bigger hill than I'd imagined. I'll try to make it out - if not this friday then soon. Bousquet is a classic small locals' hill, with some unusual history - first electric-lit night skiing in the world, and half a dozen olympians started here. BE looks better if the website is accurate (and there's a hardbooter on the front page!).

Yep - when conditions are right and the crowds are down Mt Snow can be excellent. Fallen Timbers on the north side, Ridge on the main face, and of course Snowdance (and Sundance if it's covered). Lots of easy in and out tree stashes around, too. When the snow's good South Bowl (watch out for the compression in the flats) into Sundance is a really great workout Okemo tends to groom out one side of their steeper trails (nothing super steep on the whole hill) so that's pretty cool. Stratton's terrain isn't all that varied but it's a thrill to be able to gang up with so many skilled hardbooters that that more than makes up for the limits of the hill. OT: I see you're in western MA too - riding anywhere tomorrow? I might get out to Butternut or Bousquet for a few hours.

Thanks - I can tell I'd better make it a point to get there for at least a day. Tough in my business (theatre) because we're not supposed to ride when we're under contract. That's why I've been off the hill so much recently. Always seemed ridiculous to me but then two of us snuck away to Wa-wa during my last run in Boston and nearly took each other out...