Dan

I am super-disappointed about this but as things turned out, I knuckled under to the man last week and canceled my planned vacation for Whitefish, so now I'm only doing Schweitzer. Work has been off the rails bonkers lately - in January we're going to hit like 160% of target revenue - and I didn't see a way to get through everything if I still attended WTF. I need to go post my shame on the WTF thread, but I've been hiding ;-) I'm sorry to miss the chance to meet up in person - let's try again next year. I need to quit this job before next season so work doesn't get in the way of snowboarding...

Hey Buster, sounds good - just meet me at Schweitzer this week and I'll be happy to hook you up!

Again, I'm not the one with the board to give away...

Yeah...there were a couple of Seattle carvers that used to hang out here, but I haven't seen them for awhile. I would take it off your hands, but I already have too many boards and not enough days on snow - no point having it sit in my basement if you can find someone that will ride it. Looks like maybe it will find a new home in MA

Welcome to the dark side!

That is a nice board! I know that packing is a PITA, but I'm sure someone will pay enough to cover shipping and maybe packaging too if you put it on the classifieds.

Chiming in to agree with the low snow comments. To top it off, they're calling for rain on Thursday even higher up on the mountain - this is the forecast for Mt. Hood Meadows: http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lon=-121.6688576341901&lat=45.34194381514135#.WDRQ3dg76f0 Timberline doesn't show rain in the forecast, but they are claiming snow on Thursday at 40 degrees...I guess that could happen (?) Personally I probably wouldn't bring the gear for the conditions we have if you're just contemplating a session or two of night riding.

Got my first day of the season at Meadows today. On Friday night/Saturday morning, the ski area had rain, a freeze, and maybe an inch of fresh on top of that, so surface conditions were not great. However, it was bluebird, so take the good with the bad. Classic carving runs like Shooting Star Ridge were a little too firm for fun, we found that Middle Fork on MH Express was actually the best run of the day -- also had a few good runs through Daisy Bowl, but crowds chased us away. We arrived at the base of the Meadows exit at 8 and didn't park until 8:30 because traffic on the access road was so slow. We went to the main lot because we needed to pick up passes - for the rest of the season, HRM is the way to go.

I got my first day of the season at Mt. Bachelor yesterday. Bluebird day with fast grippy snow and pretty thin crowds until around 11 or so. Cloudchaser was still a little bare - there are some rocks and grass sticking out on piste -- but there's good coverage on other chairs. Tickets there are now eye-wateringly expensive - do they raise prices over the holidays? I'll be back in April, but that's probably it.

Uh-oh, now I'm going to want to demo yours some time :-)

Nice Al! Getting pretty excited for my Superconductor...it will be my first brand new (not just new to me) board in over 10 years (!)

We used to ride at Mt. Hood with an alpine snowboarder who had a life-size stop sign patch -- a big red octagon with "STOP" -- stitched on the back of his jacket. Called him "Stop sign Mike," I wonder what he's up to these days, haven't seen him in forever.

Yes! That's the plan. It has been a much longer process than it should have been, due to me dorking around with the topsheet design, but I do believe we're in the final stretch. Looking forward to posting some pics in the New Board thread soon!

Not my ad, just thought these boards might be of interest to someone that's just getting started - they are priced right and include bindings. https://portland.craigslist.org/grg/spo/d/snowboards/6428907045.html

Looks like you got a deal! The base looks pretty mint. Do you have dimensions? I'm 99% sure that was never a stock Donek topsheet, so if they had a pic of the topsheet, they could probably give you full specs, but I'm sure it's their busy season and they're hustling hard building new boards. The nose is truncated in your pic, but based on the tail, it looks like a Flux or maybe a Saber - see descriptions of each on www.donek.com. Given the topsheet, I thought it might be a pow-specific board, but I don't think that's the case.

OK...I hope that you local guys really do ride 5 days a week because the PDX crew is locked and loaded for the previous week, arriving the night of 1/17 and riding 1/18-1/20...I will actually probably ride the morning of 1/21 too, everyone is heading back on the 21st. Hope that some of the local crew can make it to the hill those days! I'm really sorry to split the event, but I already had some stuff locked in assuming NICE would be the week of the 15th.

Um, fudge. For some reason I thought that NICE was a week earlier. It's actually the 22nd to 27th?

Wow! I'm underweight anyway, but that is a good deal.

Pretty interesting article - Google Translate does a surprisingly good job on it. Doesn't sound like Vic will be petitioning to regain his citizenship any time soon.

I just came here to post that, but you beat me to it! Wonder if Vic Wild will petition to become a US citizen again ;-)

I've done that! Minus the drunk friend -- I have only myself to blame.

Great article, thanks for pointing it out. It is always kind of surprising to me that mainstream articles like this don't give a short explanation of what alpine snowboarding is -- does John Q Public NYT reader have any idea what snowboard PGS is?

My brother in law lives in the Czech Republic, and we met him and his family for a ski trip in the Dolomites three or four years ago. We stayed in this village: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seis_am_Schlern, and accessed the ski area via a long gondola ride to the base area. I think the ski area was Alta Badia, but I may be wrong, it has been a few years, as I mentioned. Now here's the thing that was totally new to me as an American: there are chair lifts everywhere, in all directions, and you can cover substantial ground doing "ski touring" - there are multiple ski areas that share a common pass: https://www.dolomitisuperski.com/en One very cool thing that we did was a day trip around a massif - it took all day and needed careful attention to direction finding (fortunately my BIL is very familiar with the area), but what an awesome experience. It's called the Sellaronda: http://www.sellaronda.info/eng/, and involved a ton of riding and at one point, walking at least half a mile through a town to a cog railroad to go up to the next chair lift. Just really different and fun from an American perspective. At home, we get to the hill as early as possible, charge hard for 3-4 hours, and are gone by 1. The Alpine riding experience is totally different: enjoy the scenery, make some turns, stop for a coffee or hot chocolate, some more lazy runs, an amazing lunch at a mountain hut -- you get the idea. A really great trip and I hope to get the chance to go back some time. Note that I opted not to bring a snowboard; I bought a used Oxygen Proton from ebay.de and had it shipped to the hotel where we stayed our night of arrival. We didn't rent a car, went everywhere by public transit, so it was kind of a drag to carry it everywhere, but I only paid about 120 euros for the board and bindings, which beats the hell out of paying to carry one of my nice boards from home and worrying about damage: I only had to carry my boots. At any rate, highly recommended, you will have a blast!

I'm in! My wife is even coming out for the weekend

Well, I admit there are better looking cars out there. On the other hand, there is no other AWD wagon at this price point, so whatcha gonna do? Maybe the new Buick Regal TourX will surprise everyone by handling great in snow and being mechanically reliable.