philw

The X3... has the same nominal res as the X2. I don't think there's a sensible option which will give a 4k crop at this point. You get 1080p from the x3, albeit it's a lot better than the earlier 360 cameras I used. Old GoPro 4k footage still beats anything I can get from the x3, as you'd expect. What you can do is to "up res" it with something like Topaz AI, which is what I did with this one below. That, in my humble opinion, is about as it's going to get from cropping into a 5.7k 360. These small sensor cameras seem to work best in good light. If you have a separate person holding the camera, of course you can always look at a proper mirrorless camera - I have a Sony and obviously it takes way better stills and also video than you can get from a cropped 360 camera. You can go crazier... but you have to carry it around. Look for a decent sized sensor with ability to extract high data rate. You can work out the frame rate you need for slow motion (although you can get some of that from "ai" software too). You don't really need interchangeable lenses for 3rd person shooting snow - a mid range zoom covers the bases in practice. One thing worth bearing in mind is that services like Vimeo transcode whatever you upload and you lose quality there (at least for the free services). You probably want to shoot raw, process in ProRes or something uncompressed, output as H.265.

That's what I see with all these styles. Bottoms. In the air. Perhaps the reason people do the "snow diving" and "bottom in air" tricks on those easy slopes they stick to is precisely because they're functionally bad - they're waving their arses at people simply because they can, not because it's useful. To be fair I think the original post was asking for tips on how to dive for the snow, not how to learn to carve turns. I like the Casper Carver's style, but it'd be better without the hand reaches, IMHO.

The maths is handy and looks reasonable. I think most people from experience know it's mostly about air resistance at speed, without necessarily knowing the physics of why. Most people know from experience that tucking is the most effective way to maintain speed on a flat (well aside from a tow from a pickup truck). The square-cube law is perhaps all you need in addition to that. --- Would anyone care to take a stab at the physics of board length? If you take out of the equation the mass, flex and design of the board, what is the effect of board length precisely? I'm after the mechanics/ physics.

The physics doesn't know that. It's a bit like cars - they all exploit exactly the same physics, but different people choose different vehicles because they want different things from them. Obviously my choice is superior... but other choices exist

That seems correct to me. Obviously sidecut has some effect, but it doesn't work in a simplistic manner, and needs to be considered along with lots of other board design parameters such as taper, sidecut shape, but most importantly flex and how that's distributed. Which I think is why riding boards is better than reading specifications. I'm not a massive effective edge person either - to me, the actual running length isn't really that important either. As fashions changed my hardpack board length has gone from 1.64m to 1.44m and I'm not riding slower or turning any less. The other design changes which come with that length change (principally I think better construction & flex design) are the key things, not the running or absolute length of the board.

You only need one pair of boots. I use Atomic Backlands with the Phantom levers and they're better on hardpack than any dedicated hard snowboard boot I ever used before. I don't compete or Eurocarve, but for general riding hard in powder and at resorts, I want nothing else. The Phantom Slipper is a cut-down version of the Backland; unless you need something softer than the Backland (unlikely if you're interested in hardboot carving), then I'd not think those particularly relevant. I ride a lot of powder and never felt the need to cut anything down.

I don't like the Flight Attendant, although I can't remember exactly why. It's got a short tail and a very long rockered nose is probably it. The Hometown Hero on the other hand is more general purpose and has been extremely popular with my softboot mates, all of whom carve albeit not EC etc. It also rips hardpack with hard boots. I personally find "no tail" boards less fun to carve, overall. But that to me would be the key feature.

Neal Stephenson's Termination Shock is a good one and it includes a little bit of snowboarding. This from the chapter called "The Barracks", for example, my colouring:

Iceland, but give it a month or two to get lighter.

I guess this is going to be more of a problem with these wannabe carvers: it'll probably get worse before it gets better. Seriously, anyone who can actually carve probably needs to watch out for these numpties too, now.

Interesting. Inflammation seems to be generally a bad thing. Got any links to stuff to read on that?

At the cat operator we used to carry a couple of Burton Fish on the roof of the cat, which we called "day savers". Those would come out when someone turned up with some weird board - I won't give examples as the argument would start. We could never people to use proper boards, but once they'd suffered on the first run and watched everyone else have fun, we could have sold those Fish to them for any money at all. Actually I think there is a best board, in that what you get from those big boards - stability at slow speed on mellow slopes or "travel" in flat areas the rider hasn't spotted soon enough - I don't need. It's rare for anyone to bring anything big into a BC helicopter these days. I'm going the other way, smaller and smaller.

Actually here's the same thing from a speed ski course in 2005, Austria. I can't remember the guy's speed, but it would have been between 130Km/h and 200, so faster than almost everyone else will ever go on a snowboard.

Yeah no hand straps allowed in heliskiing or catskiing. Or leashes etc. I carry a radio. They come with a remote mic which you can stick on a pack strap if you want it out there. I don't think they're massively useful other than for a rescuer to inform the rest of the group that you're helping someone so will be a while, but that no assistance is needed etc. The whistle has the advantage of being directional, as does the transceiver if it comes to that. Don't know if the OP video guy rode away or not, I don't think you'd be too cold from a few minutes in a tree well. The one which has that issue is when someone falls into a creek, which I've seen a couple of times. Rescue from those can be fairly technical, and you have a massive time pressure if they're soaked through with near freezing water in minus 20... I think the OP video guy was at a resort, so probably a mobile phone would been as good as a radio (if it wasn't in flight mode...). But a phone could have been used to call the patrol once the guy was out, maybe?

If you know your buddy's coming, if you're truly inverted and breathing from the well's airspace, you may be best waiting for the buddy. There's no obvious rush, and if you struggle much you may fill that airspace. Step-ins are great, but you have to unload the pins to get them to release. If you're actually hanging by your board upside down, releasing them may not be quite as easy as one may at first suppose.

Oh, oh, oh... more boot options! Yay. Seriously, if boots start being reasonably compatible in this respect, it does increase the available options.

That would be my approach, if you have "soft boot boards", in my experience they ride perfectly well with hard boots, and are likely way better than ancient Burton boards. The "speedway" looks like it may work. Check the width at the mount point (you may want narrower than reference with Salomon) to see what angles you can get away with (very wide boards don't work well with the steeper angles of hard boots). I'd start by getting some relatively cheap and simple F2 bindings which will work with both old boots and any new. As shipped in the EU those will allow 1° front toe lift and 3° back heel lift out of the box. I'm not sure how well the plastic in old boots stands up. I'd be nervous about those.

Can you post a photo? I'm not questioning your word at all, I'm just curious how they look. I like the Backlands, but like the sound of more options too.

I think that shows two failed buddy pairings, not one successful one. The rescuer's partner was way down the mountain: you can see him in the first frames. Can't hear either partner yelling to each other. The skier and the boarder who he saved were not together: the border's three mates were all down the bottom somewhere. If the skier hadn't picked that line and also fallen immediately above the boarder, the outcome may have been different.

I'm fairly sure that the sort of people who deride new stuff once derided snowboards too.

It was hard, in the UK at least, to find information on what was a sport no one other than me had heard of, in those days. And for a laugh, from that same book, page 3: To me that's obviously that's a US perspective; this side of the pond the world looked a little different, at least in those very early days. I remember seeing my first French kids dressed like [what I thought was probably] LA gangsters with their park gear... the future was theirs, for a while at least.

Twin Tip Kenny has some claims on the twin tip, but it depends precisely what one means. Ken still has his old boards. https://barfoot.com/about/ Europe and soft boot carving I'm not sure, short of Iceland I've not been since Covid, what with not great snow this season etc. Koura Shapes is European though, albeit marketing a somewhat different image. I'm not sure commercially if Oxcess and Kessler will move in that direction, or if the more sideslip-focused brands will take that ground. Arguably Ftwo is in a place where advantage could also be taken. I think it depends if you can shift the mindset from Korea/Japan [which Koura wisely did not] or not. Perhaps they'll all start Japanese sounding brands Switch/ Fakie In the early days I thought people used the term "fakie" more than "switch", where as today it seems to be the opposite, but I'd have to analyse TWS's text to know if that is true. I used to ride both skis and monoskis backwards... we never used either term. My library's organized in a way I like but which makes rapid location of books tricky. I did manage to find a 1991 text "the basic essentials of snowboarding" by John McMullen, published in the USA/Canada in 1991. The glossary includes the term fakie, but not switch. And it doesn't include ollie because back then they weren't noboarding, so the action was different. The meaning of ollie has since changed somewhat. I do have other books from the time, somewhere. Mostly they were of limited use, but I was already a more advanced rider than the instructors and I was just trying to hoover up all the information I could. I was on the internet, but almost none of you lot were on it at that point: it was good for snow conditions in BC, that was about it.

I'm not disagreeing, but have they? I know she said that, but do they have other evidence to show that?

And as I was discussing this with someone else just now for other reasons... one aspect of evolution is happening remarkably quickly, which is the change back from duck to forward stances in the general population. Most pre-Covid stuff I googled seems very ducky. It's almost like there was only one way to ride in 2017 : duck. Today though, both Koura and Jones snowboard websites are strongly pushing forward angles. It's a different world all of a sudden. Koura's Wolken's internet trail shows his stance getting narrower and steeper rapidly: in 2017 he was 52cm 21/6, in 2023 he's 49cm 27/15. I'm not quite suggesting evolution in stiffness of boots, but something major is/ has happened in stance geometry in the last few years.

I think that's correct. Which begs the question... why are many "alpine" boards quite so narrow? When I started (1989) Alpine boards were Asymmetrical, looking weird compared with ordinary general purpose snowboards. I don't particularly recall thinking they were particularly narrow though. Stances were not, in the late 1980s. Over time, my powder boards got fatter, and my piste boards got narrower. Then mainstream powder board design changed with taper, shorter designs and better tail shapes. My piste board got shorter too, with Titanal. I ended up with a Kessler with a 19cm waist and my Hometown Hero with a 24cm waist... The Kessler would win races, but for general use, I don't feel I'm giving anything at all up for that extra width... and it lets me use a lower angled stance. Kind of like the early stances, except there's no Craig "knee tuck" these days and no asymmetry, thankfully When I watch my [soft boot] buddies ride, I can't tell the difference, from a distance. I've ridden soft boot boards with my hard boots since I discovered that soft boot boards work better in deep snow than race boards. I don't think it's the boots, but I guess I do think it's the board