SunSurfer

Yeah, Pureboarding style needs inward cant on the rear and ideally a sloppy laterally binding tension together with a soft rear boot for the knee drive. Joerg is dismissive of Intec heels for the reason they are too tight laterally. Pureboarding is visually more spectacular with the body drags etc. while a narrow board lends itself to a clean minimalist pencil line carve style, appreciated by those in the know. Both are entirely valid ways of having an absolute great time on the mountain. Glad you found the video helpful in understanding your setup.

UPZ boots have some features you can take advantage of. Preset position for cuff - try setting the front boot cuff as upright as possible and the rear boot cuff as flexed forward as possible. Springs: adjust the springs so the front is moderately tight, but the rear as free moving as possible. Cuff canting: Ideally your boot cuffs are set so that standing in your boots with your feet straight below your hips the soles are flat on the floor. But you can produce the leg alignment effect of a couple of degrees of canting by deliberately tilting the boot that way. Your stance should be in proportion to your physique as was pointed out at the beginning of this thread. Flat bindings will shorten the stance distance you will feel comfortable riding. Technique for putting the board on edge and absorbing bumps is incredibly important for rider fatigue. I rode once with someone who was better than me when I started out and gave me lots of tips. But by now I'd improved a little. Halfway down he stopped by the side of the run to catch his breath. He grumbled "You're making more turns than me, better turns than me, and with less effort!" Knees are the best joints for absorbing bumps. Putting the board on edge by putting your weight on the right or left sides of both of your feet frees up your knees to do the fore and aft balance adjustments and absorb the bumps. That style of riding is easier with higher binding angles, 55 degrees and higher. Between 50 and 65 degrees binding angles you are unlikely to need any canting (long explanation available on YouTube).

@Glide You might find this thread helpful if you are trying to set your board on edge with lateral pressure rather than toe/heel pressure. I describe how I came to make progress in my turns and others chime in. My technique develops as the thread progresses.

Echo. Sad for Dave and Kristen. Sad for all those who were planning to go. Sad for the people of Libby who welcome attendees and who ride Turner through its season.

Flexibility in ankles, knees, hips and lumbar spine required to get that "open" or "+" stance with the line of the shoulders across a softboot board with low binding angles. Core muscle strength (abdominals and paraspinal muscles) also essential. Yoga / Pilates /similar, cardio, and leg strength training combined would be useful preparation to then follow @crackaddict technique. Older, stiffer people (like me, about to turn 65) just move to gradually steeper angles and hardboots with stepin bindings to keep feeding our carve addiction.

The Skwal USA bindings you have have lift but no lateral tilt. With one foot in front of the other that aligns your legs below the knees but places stresses the knee joint. You may find that canting the cuffs of your ski boots outwards reduces that stress and makes for more comfort and helps with increasing your stance length. Your rear leg needs a bit more range of movement than your front when moving your centre of mass up and down, so buckling your rear boot cuff a little looser than the front may be helpful. I have a Skwal USA Powder Skwal and ride it at the max stance its inserts allow, around 47cm binding centre to binding centre. For comparison I'm 182cm tall and legs maybe 2cm longer than average for that height. The board is wider than a standard Skwal and I ride it regular stance with bindings at 85 front and 80 degrees rear. When I first started riding it I used ski poles for a while to help me get the feel of things. Leaning into the turns like I was riding a motorbike soon had me carving highly inclined carves.

FIS Snowboard now showing and scheduling live streams of the current season World Cup events on its YouTube Live section. Not sure how long the recorded live streams will remain available.

@dredman Nice to see the credit for your camera operator. Getting good shots is harder than it might first appear!

Thought to be caused by overall global heating destabilising the flow of the Arctic jet stream. How long it stays cold for you in North America after the recent cold snap is another matter.

From having made a couple of instruction videos of my own, I know only too well how much effort and time goes into these. 40+ minutes is a long time. An alternative would be to break the subject up into shorter sections, perhaps focused on a single component that an aspiring carver could work on. Then a final one putting the components together. More focused segments also allows tighter scripting. Shorter shots edited together means you have less to remember to say and don't need to refer to your script as you were towards the end. Creating a video plan beforehand, of each individual shot and exactly what it will contain helps to tighten things up nicely. Typo check: Extention or extension? Loved the lecture aid of the slot cut in deep snow! Adds to your cred that you live in a place with so much snow. Thanks so much for taking the time to pass on your knowledge.

Your stance will effectively end up putting one foot in front of the other. Lift helps you deal with that. Your stance may also effectively put you feet closer together, or further apart than they were when you get your boot cuffs canted to get the soles flat on the floor. Closer together or further apart moves your legs sideways and laterally tilts the boot sole. Canting, which can be either direction and in varying amounts helps to deal with that sideways leg tilt.

I can and have recommended Revelstoke after my time there in Feb 2023. Wrote a review on the Ride Board section.

Jack's instructions above are a simple and reasonable start point. Binding angles are generally aimed to get the toe and heel of your boots as close to the edge of the board as possible, but without the overhang referred to above. That allows you to more easily get the board onto either edge, but not have your boot toe or heel drag in the snow as you arc through a carved turn with your board high on its edge. Bindings usually are adjustable for the position of both the toe and heel, and depending on how your boot sits in the binding, you may want to move the boot either forward or back in the binding in order to get both the toe and heel as close as possible to the edge. Because your front binding should be angled slightly more along the length of the board the front boot toe and heel won't necessarily be as close to the edge as the rear. I'd also recommend you get the canting of your boot cuffs sorted so that your boot soles are flat when you stand upright. Lots of YouTube videos demonstrate the process for ski boots. The aim is exactly the same for hard snowboard boots. Because hard snowboard boots are HARD, getting everything aligned correctly is essential for comfortable and functional riding. A good stance for you is first of all comfortable to stand in. It should allow you to effectively balance on either edge. It should allow you to move your centre of mass both up and down, and forward and back.

A pleasure to watch. You look like you are riding a conventional Skwal stance, and by that I mean compared to a current hardboot snowboard stance, the centre to centre stance length is relatively short, the bindings have no canting to accommodate the fact that the legs are one behind the other, and you might not be using any front toe lift or rear foot heel lift. Experimenting with canting and lift may allow you to lengthen your stance and increase the size of your base of support, making your position more stable and powerful. Hardboot snowboarding started out with shorter stances than are used today, lots of canting and the riders knees locked together. A better understanding of the way stances and body shape interact has led to that stance evolving. To my mind that development process hasn't really happened for skwals.

@crackaddict bringing back sweet memories of my time riding with you at Revelstoke after MCC 2023! Heal up fast.

Hoping it stays cold and snows a lot between now and MCC.

A wannabe Franz Klammer who can't carve a turn and is compensating for their tiny penis is always behind you.

IMHO the only place for straight lining is a cordoned off downhill course. I can understand the thrill of speed for a skier or boarder over terrain features, but to do it where other mountain users are riding and at speeds where you cannot stop within the visible distance ahead reveals a sense of personal entitlement and lack of general consideration for others. Maybe ski area signage about the code should remind users about their local liability under civil tort law e.g. Colorado Ski Safety Act which uses the code as the standard and assigns liability for civil damages to the rider who is judged more than 50% responsible for the collision.

Yeah it was pretty tense driving for me (se post above) and just trying to keep it all very smooth. As a NZer I was stunned at how expensive hire vehicles were, and that vehicles being hired out in Montana in midwinter were not able to be adequately equipped for the conditions. None of Hertz, Avis, National etc would allow chains nor guarantee snow tyres. In NZ in winter, chains are routinely offered for winter hires in parts of the country were snow can be expected.

And NZ, although maybe a few years later. Ruapehu Alpine Lifts troubles are just the first of many to come.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/10/we-cant-pretend-the-ecological-crisis-is-separate-the-economist-thinking-differently-about-climate-breakdown Article describes the podcast and current thinking of an economist with an environmental focus.

Your SnowPro Race bindings are an old but solid design, and those look like the version with 6mm thick bails. They have built in 3 degree lateral tilt (cant) which is not appropriate at the the angles needed to ride this, or indeed most alpine snowboards. The bindings can be adjusted for up to 3 degrees of lift and the inbuilt cant can be removed but this requires home made wedges and new appropriate length screws to hold the toe and heel pieces to the metal base. SnowPros cannot be set to angles higher than approx. 60-65 degrees. They are a relatively limited adjustment design. Some people still happily ride this design, but not many.

Intriguing hinge design revealed in the Setup guide. A kind of rotating cam, a little like the adjustment mechanism for hardboot cuff canting. Thanks @WinterGold

Road from Libby to Turner access road is sealed, and in 2023 when I was at MCC was cleared fairly quickly after fresh snow. The access road is unsealed and effectively one-way. There is a decent depth ditch on the uphill side of the access road. I was driving an all wheel drive SUV hire, which was not provided with snow tyres and no option for chains, and ended up sliding into the ditch on a morning with lots of fresh snow. (Got towed out by the groomer ) Having driven in snow with chains many times in New Zealand, I would have been much more confident driving a 2 wheel drive with chains on. Chains just need practice and there are tricks to getting them on and off quickly.