OhD

There's a pair of Oxygen boots MP27 at Replay Sports in Aspen for $40. Not Intec compatible but if you don't mind standard bindings they might be suitable. Maybe one of the Montucky boys could pick them up for you.

17. Dennis Mullen

Works well for me too. A little trig and a micrometer or dial caliper can make it as precise as you want. Make a mark on the file at the correct distance from the tape and keep that at the edge. File with a single-cut mill file held square across the board such that the shavings are ejected outboard rather than inboard where they will get embedded in the base. This will raise a burr on the edge which you can remove when filing the side bevel.

https://fbcdn-sphotos-b-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-prn1/t1/p320x320/1013859_10152176462388010_1785964733_n.jpg How about this?

Dan Have you ever worked with old fir? In my experience it is much harder and more brittle than many woods, but still has the strength differentials between early/latewood characteristic of younger fir. Prone to splintering, too. If you find some really tight grain, though, it can be worth the trouble. Finding larger timbers that haven't checked and stored up stress as they have tried to twist while drying in a constrained state is tough - expect some instability when you thickness your material unless it's quarter sawn (rare in structural parts). It will require lots of weather protection outdoors as it is not as hard as, say, ipe, and it is not very resistant to rot, fungus or water staining, so it's easily dented enough to break a finish and let moisture in to wreak ugly havoc. It is traditionally used on NW fish boat hulls and decks, oiled and sometimes tarred in the latter use, but more for cost (when the boats were built), strength and weight than because of durability. Old wooden fish boats tend to consume a lot of replacement parts, even when built with all the best methods. It does make a beautiful cabinet wood - take care to design so it doesn't tend to get dented by shoes, or gouged by fingernails, and don't make any working surfaces too precious. My brother did his whole kitchen and some furniture out of salvaged CVG gym bleachers. It's gorgeous, but not as tolerant of abuse as one might like. Be sure to bring your own power and make sure the house distribution is dead, or use cords off one well-known circuit. Sparks and dry old wood are bad enough. Damaged tools and toasted friends can really put a damper on the salvage party. De-nail timbers as early as you can to reduce handling hazards and try to sweep your messes into areas where you won't be stepping on them. Good luck - it's kind of like mining.

Forgot the photo...

Level Flys bought here two years ago, holding up well with some help from glued-on webbing and black polyurethane sealant (similar to Sikaflex or 3M 5200) on the fingertips. I replaced the loop velcro a couple of weeks ago as it was shot, but they are still warm and stay pretty dry - most moisture that gets in seems to be dragged in by my hands after fiddling with a camera or something. I think they have at least a couple of years left in them at ~30 days of snowboarding per. They seem to protect my wrists well, but the left brace bears on my watch strap hard sometimes. The reinforced pads are really sticky on hard snow - damn near left my arm behind the first time I touched!

Saturday thru Monday (1/20) were great. Still could use more snow to smooth out the runs and disperse some of the traffic into the extensive glades and forest, but on the other hand, the crowd was pretty minor (except for a busy Saturday) and in great spirits for the Seahawks/49ers game on Sunday. Snow was really nice today, at least until 1:00. Bluebird, warm (high 30's at least up top), light breeze and thin crowd. Fast singles lines and interested chair company, and my new Surefoot liners were comfy. Life doesn't get much better than that... I should have fun watching the Budbowl in Aspen. There's gotta be a good venue for a 'Hawks fan (not the stuff of the 12th man, but still a fan) somewhere in town...

A great lyric, to be sure. Written by Bennie Benjamin, Gloria Caldwell, and Sol Marcus and first performed by Nina Simone some 16 years before Regina Spektor was born. As one of the eight, I was very impressed (at an impressionable age) by the version recorded by Eric Burdon and the Animals in 1965.

Overwhelming crowd at Blackcomb today. 2 + hours to get from base to top of Excelerator, whence straight to Glacie:r lodge to warm up , defog goggles and pee. JC eventually opened and I got a few good runs under the chair in the deep and fluffy fresh. Too soft for carving so I was on freewheel skis. 15+ minute lift lines all day everywhere except for a late no-line load on JC at 3:15.Yesterday was decent carving for half the day then ice or lumps for the afternoon. I don't know what possessed me to come here for a weekend.

Groomers were quite good 12/31. I hear there's been a bunch of fresh snow so carving will be subprime but a bunch of the glades in the Basin should now have adequate cover. I plan to be there 1/18-19.

Steer the board to where you want it to be with respect to the body, rather than thinking about positioning your body over the board. You can vary the angulation of the board WRT the snow without having to move your whole carcass in a rotary movement about the longitudinal axis of the inch or two of board width you are perched upon. (think about it - how often are you making a turn from even the wide platform of a flat base?). Get comfortable steering the board with little ankle/knee movements. Start with little wedel turns (squiggles) on easy slopes, then progress to big arcs with little squiggles superimposed at will, then gradually pick up the pace and intensity of the turns while always having the board make the quick moves and do the hard work. Try to just let the body sail smoothly along in nice arcs while the board fidgets and scurries along below like a waiter carrying a big tray of dishes. As you get the hang of it and get up to reasonable speed, it takes less fidgeting and adjustment mid-turn and pretty soon you are finishing one turn nearly weightless as the board crosses beneath your body to engage the new edge right where it needs to be to gently catch your hurtling meat and divert it toward the next turn. (The gentle catches and weightless transitions are averaged out to fairly hard work by the stiff radial force you have to apply to keep your carcass from becoming one with the deck mid-turn).

Something bad happened to me on Dec 31, 2013, about 1:30. I recall deciding to ride behind three friends (Eric, Brittany and Josh, all on skis) on a green run (Tree Hugger) off the Basin chair in the new expansion area at White Pass. I wanted to stay behind them and work on my heelside turns without having to worry about getting whacked by a friend (or holding them back - fast skiers all). The run is easy, wide and gladed with clusters of Alpine Fir. We were riding there because the upper part of the basin was blanketed with thick freezing fog and practically un-navigable at any speed. Tree Hugger was well groomed, considering that the snowpack is extremely low so far, there had been only a little snow for a couple of weeks, and everything had been machined ice or really firm refrozen hardpack two days earlier. It had rained hard the night of the 30th, then snowed perhaps three inches on top of the compromised boilerplate, but I had been edging pretty well and having a good day of it to that point. Eric, Brittany and I had stopped for a snack and coffee a little earlier and I wasn't feeling at all fatigued. Somewhere perhaps a third of the way down the run I woke up on my back in the snow and tried to get up. After some indeterminate time I tried again and succeeded, and apparently rode on down to meet them at the Basin lift, where they were at the head of a negligible line. I pulled up and unclipped my back foot from my newly-converted-to-standard TD3. Then I had a pleasant dream about riding somewhere else during the slow ride up the fixed quad, not too surprising as I'd been up 'til midnight effecting a repair to the sprinkler system at our ski club lodge, then risen at 05:45 to have breakfast ready at 07:00. I got off the chair and skated straight out to the flat, stopped to clip in, noting an odd sensation of being adrift in time and a little vague as to where exactly I was. I turned and spotted my friends standing down at the trail map below the top of the lift, rode one-footed down to join them, and mentioned to Eric that I really didn't remember the last run or chair ride and was having a kind of peculiar sensation of disorientation. Eric asked me if I remembered trying to load on the chair with them, which I did not. He noted that they had waited a good five mnutes for me at the bottom of the lift, that I had failed to get all the way into the loading lane and had been bumped off by the armrest of the chair, and that I had finally loaded eight chairs behind the three of them. Stu, an off-duty patroller buddy of ours happened by, and Eric or Brittany hailed him to come over and check me out. Stu checked out my pupillary response, which was OK, and interrogated me about what I remembered and was feeling, while Brittany (I think) went to the lift chack to call patrol dispatch. A few minutes later I took off my board, laid down in a sled and got tucked in for a remarkably quick trip down to the clinic in the main lodge. During and after examination by three clinicians and then the doc on call, with a coherent chronology and details furnished by Eric, Brittany and Josh, it became fairly clear to me (and probably considerably clearer to everyone else in the room) that I had wrecked unseen by anyone and taken a good five minutes to get up and catch up (on a 2- 3 minute run). I had seemed kind of drifty and absent in the lift line, then failed to move into position quickly enough to load and got knocked aside, but not with any apparent head impacts. They had waited at the top for me to get there and unload, then another few minutes while I chatted with someone who approached me to ask about my equipment ( I hope I made a good impression on behalf of the sport - I have no memory of that time). The brief conversation I recalled between meeting up with tthem and taking the decision to sled me down took at least fifteen minutes as I apparently was really sloooow responding to any verbal cues, although I felt and sounded fairly lucid and stood comfortably the whole time. After an hour of observation in the clinic I was released with instructions to not sleep more than a few minutes at a time and to remain supervised until I could see an ER or a neurologist and get a CAT scan to check for any internal bleeding or deterioration of my condition. Fortunately, I was able to reach my wife who was staying home to tend her horse (another story), and she and a friend could drive the two hours up top the Pass and take me and my car home. We all repaired to the club lodge to wait, and had dinner with Karen and Mary when they arrived, then Karen drove me back to the Tri-Cities and the local ER for an evaluation and CAT scan. I was feeling a little headachy, short of sleep, anxious and buzzed on coffee, but otherwise pretty well by then, but almost too self-aware to just feel normal and act naturally. Nothing I have ever done legally has engendered so much doubt as to whether or not I felt normal - I wasn't at all certain how I really felt. Fortunately, I looked normal to the specialist who examined me, presenting me with verbal puzzles and tests, coordination tests and having a nice chat about our skiing careers (he had, as a teenager, skied - with a broken and torn shoulder - away from a 60mph collision with a spectator who had trespassed onto the downhill course just below a roller as he sailed off it.). All the while he was making a number of careful observations that assured him that I had, in fact, sufferred only a mild concussion and was probably not in any danger. The senior neurologist on duty (who never saw me, unless he was watching on video) recommended a CAT scan anyway, based on the span of time for which my memory was impaired and my age (61), so I got my brain nuked with a year's worth of ionizing radiation in about two minutes. (Didn't feel a thing, so don't you Coloradans bother trying to get CAT scanners deregulated.) The good news was that there was no sign of bleeding or any other trauma inside the peanut gallery. The interesting news was that the back of my skull is abnormally thin, so the helmet I was wearing probably kept my remaining brains inside where they belong. Thank you Giro... and enjoy your retirement! I'm advised to not whack my head again anytime soon (4 weeks or so...). In the couple of days since, I have done a couple of 6-8 mile hikes in the hills, caught up on my sleep (albeit restless from a cold and several aches and pains, not all related to the crash, and a bit of headache that comes on when I sink too far into the sofa or lie down). and otherwise functioned pretty normally. I went to my GP for a follow up about 48 hours after, which included an extensive quiz session, and he told me I seemed to be fine - and rather lucky. He advised that second-concussion fatality is rare for adults (much more common for youngsters), but that each concussion does some increment of permanent damage. I don't plan to quit riding, but I intend to be more selective about conditions and circumstances (this was only my 4th day on snow in my first winter retired - thanks to low snowfall). I plan to buy a MIPS helmet and will keep an eye on the development of the Hovding airbag helmets (http://www.hovding.com/ - they may have to refine the controls considerably to accommodate the dynamics of snowsports). I still plan to attend SES. Watch out for the guy in the orange and purple Trew suit - he can ride while unconscious....

I tried some smoked paprika in some leftovers tonight - delicious! Smoked salt and smoked paprika - even better. I'm starting to suspect that there's vegan bacon somewhere near at hand....

Here's a recipe I came up with as an alternative entree for a Christmas dinner we hosted for friends ranging from paleos to vegans. I am calling it Savory Tofu for lack of a better name. Preheat oven to 350F Combine in a mixing bowl, blender or food processor and chop finely, as for a tapenade: 3 oz dry shiitake mushrooms (Chinese), soaked in boiling water briefly to soften, but not too soggy, and drained well. 1Tbsp brewers yeast 1Tbsp finely chopped sundried tomatoes (oil-packed) 1.5 Tbsp Braggs Amino Acids sauce 2 tsp key lime juice Prepare: 1.5 Tbsp finely chopped garlic 1 sprig (or ~1tsp) each rosemary and 1/2 tsp or a few leaves sage, ground or finely chopped 4 green onions, chopped 1 lb package extra firm tofu, drained and cubed ~10mm Smoked salt to taste Olive oil In a 10" - 12" skillet, saute the garlic in 2 Tbsp olive oil over medium-high heat until golden, add the spices and onions, then the mushrooms, tomatoes, yeast and aminos blend, turn down the heat, cover and simmer for a few minutes. Check and remove the cover if needed to reduce moisture so there's barely any free liquid. Fold in the tofu and salt and toss well but gently to not break up the cubes. Place the skillet in the oven and finish for about 20-30 minutes (check for dryness and cover if desired to keep it moist). The dish has a lot of umami flavor and makes a pretty robust entree. I managed to get the moisture level low enough that it didn't come off as a stew, but something easy to eat with a fork. I think some smoked paprika might be good in it. Smoked salt really contributes a lot to the flavor, but don't overdo it as the amino sauce tastes fairly salty. The dish was well received by the vegans and made a tasty complement to a pork crown roast butterflied and stuffed with orange gingerbread, apples, onions, garlic, rosemary and sage. Enjoy, and post any suggested improvements.

I've had a Zephyr 172 wide for about 5 years now and love it (it's what I'm riding in my photo). Dead flat base, kind of heavy and it felt kind of sluggish and numb at first until I got attuned to the response characteristics. That done, the board rocks - solid carving, very nimble in bumps (ask Mike T) and fairly floaty in powder. One would expect such a big board to be more floaty, but it is pretty stiff which compromises the float but seems to lend stability and carving power. It wedels along beautifully and has really nice pumping characteristics in a foot or so of fresh Cascade powder. Seems to be pretty bulletproof, too. I'm hoping to hit Silverton this winter and take it for a spin on it's home turf. I've only ridden it in softboots (DriverX's with Burton bindings mostly) and the width is almost adequate for my size 12's at +15/-5. If the boards you are considering are new/warranted it's a great deal.

I decided to take advantage of the free shipping and bought new from Bomber. If I decide to switch to standards I'll be in touch.

My good boots are MP28, with 33cm length between the extreme points on the bail lugs. Will the Nideckers handle that much?

OK. Got an AirBnB place booked just out of Dillon until Thursday. I'm planning on Lovey for Sunday after SES. See you there. Thanks, all, for the suggestions.

All booked! Starting to plan the ten days between SES and a week in Telluride, knocking around CO and visiting several resorts I've not ridden yet: Keystone, A-Basin, Breck, probably a day at Vail, and perhaps Powderhorn and Sunlight as I have to hit Grand Junction on 2/15. Any recommendations on places to ride (carving, alpine or tele, and softboots)?

Will they both go to MP 30.5?

I'd like to get a complete standard upper kit for my TD3's, if someone out there is converting to step-ins. Not that interested in a trade yet - I want to try standards for awhile and see if I can forget about the easy skating and fast glide into a lift line.

Evan Do you know what range of sole lengths these can handle? What do they have in the way of canting? I might buy them for a couple of young racers in the area.

Viewer discretion is advised. The material presented may not be suitable for impressionable youngsters. Ask your parents to review it first. If the close tree pass doesn't pucker you up, you may need counseling. http://vimeo.com/77177549 Banff Mountain Film Festival World Tour is highly recommended. Some great snowsports videos and a LOT more. Some (like this Sweetgrass production) are just trailers, but worth watching in their own right. Catch the Tour if you have an opportunity!

Good steeps, great collection of snowboards mounted on the lodge walls, friendly race director (Jason Deney - give him my regards) who lets visiting carvers run their NASTAR course even on club racing nights. Great views of Mt. Washington and 3-Fingered Jack. Not as big,cosmopolitan and varied as Bachelor but a good value, a pleasant low-key vibe, and certainly worth a few visits.