st_lupo

Just wait until you try it in not so great conditions. You'll be wondering why everybody else is packing up and going home.

Good gravey!!! Sorry to hear you’re off the snow. 90: Broken tailbone on day one 92ish: Broke riding buddy’s finger (he claims) 93-97: A couple of consussions, bloody noses 98: Had a crazy wipeout while trying to keep up with my girlfriend (a DH racer, and now wife). Tore up something pretty good in my groin (SNOWBOARDING!!!) and nearly passed out when we were walking from the parking into Tommynockers. Things were an ugly purple, yellow and black mess for months. 03: Smashed up a bunch of bones in my ankle (wakeboarding) 15-19: Switched to hard boots and earned assorted shoulder cartilage damage and concussions. Seem to rack up more injuries in a shorter period carving than I ever did freeriding?

As much as I am jealous at her early start and want to say something funny about not riding fakie... Just look at her smile and look at how engaged her mom is! That is awesome parenting right there, and one happy kid! Kudos!

Happy New Years everybody! This one has enough Mother F-bombs to accurately describe how I feel about the winter we're having in my area of Norway right now.

Ooh! You didn't just go there?!?

If those SG bindings are like the F2s, could you mount the binding base plate to the board using the farthest out screw holes (without the heel/toe sleds installed on the base, but with the t-nuts captured between the board and baseplate), and the install the sleds last?

I'm with Jack in regards to the palm patches. I've had two pairs of gloves where those kinds of patches just open up and turn into big scoops. Of all of my mittens/gloves, the failure mode has always been tearing open a seam that has made contact with the ground (not that the thread splits, but the leather always tears around the seam). I really wish someone would rethink how the leather palms on mittens were cut/sewn so that the seams were moved farther back on the hand and away from the palm. Seems like it should be doable. On another note when looking for durable gloves I always try to find out what kind of leather the palms are made of; goatskin is awesome. My Hestra Army Leather Heli mittens have performed better than anything I've tried and on the palms you can see a lot of superficial wear, but the goatskin holds up really well (and these mittens have the fewest seams on the palms of anything I've seen). https://jtillman.com/material-safety/tillman-university/material-science/leather-breakdown/

I’ll be that guy

Correlation vs. causation... However the one interesting and disconcerting tidbit for me was “the rate of helmet use has doubled but the rate of head injuries did not decline.” A missing stastic is if, in general, the rate of accidents/incidents of all kinds are increasing over the measured period? Is resort terrain becoming significantly more extreme in the past decade? Has there been a boom in the off-piste extreme riding crowd? Or could it be argued that over-crowding at ski areas and pandering to tourist-level skiers/boarders is increasing the overall risk of the sport and that helmets are barely holding down the fort? I know I would argue for the later at the local ski area.

I had a stupid crash at Loveland a long time ago where I wound up catching a heel edge and slamming my head into some ice (no helmets in those days). It sure smarted and I had a mild headache after a few minutes but wasn't dizzy or disoriented. I called it a day though (it was close to closing) and after I started driving back to Denver I noticed that I couldn't read my speedometer. Or the license plate on the car in front of me. Or the street signs really. There was a spot right in the center of my vision that was kind of half like static and half like really bad artifacts like poorly compressed DVD. Probably 95% of my vision was fine but right were I would focus for reading wasn't registering right. Needless to say I stopped driving and happily after 5 or 10 minutes it cleared up and hasn't bothered me since.

Maybe the relevant debate is full-face versus non full-face? I don't think any of the FIS approved helmets for speed events have a face guard (due to risk of neck injury) but I know some folks here ride with full-face lids. Are there any obvious positive points for a face guard for snowboarding?

To paraphrase the meme: English in’t a language, its three languages stacked on top of each other and wearing a trench coat.

Stag film.

Looks cool! But kinda miss the distinctive alpine snowboard shape From the original logo. Does the logo on the flex fit cap turn out worse than the other caps?

This one's for @pokkis. Been listening to these guys a lot at work.

Great article and especially appreciated his answers to the question: "What have you learnt along the long and amazing road you have travelled with snowboarding?"

WTF as in When’s The Fracture?

Bucket listed.

I was understanding Arcan's post as pointing out the benefit of base bevel as relates to not catching the wrong edge if you get out of form... Never really thought about bevel enhancing maneuverability, so here I'll have to defer to the expert. As far as general tuning... It really depends on what you need. The three big things you get with a good tune are: Flat base Base structure Edge tune Thankfully for me #1 hasn't been a noticable problem on any of my snowboards. Take a true-bar or something you know is absolutely straight and place it on the base of the board perpendicular to the length of the board. Make sure the board is at ambient temperature and unwaxed! Drag the truebar down the board and look for any light shining through. Some convexity (base higher than the edges) you might be able to fix yourself, concave is a pain in the ass to fix. A convex board is going to be a bit vague when running flat and during edge transitions, it will also "washout" your side edges a bit. Concave is going to do the opposite and make the board squirrely. Concave/Convex problems should be fixed by a knoweldgable professional. #2 depends a lot on your riding conditions, your riding style, and how big your need for speed is. Spring snow (wet) and man-made snow can push you in the direction of wanting some base structure to improve glide. Pow and dry packed-pow reduces the advantage of the base structure. Are you a racer? Then this is something you want to consider (you might then even want to obsess about what kind of structure you get as well ). If you are a recreational carver then ask yourself how often you have the whole base gliding flat on the snow? Here I've got two Coilers without base structure, one F2 with structure and one Kessler with structure and I ride mainly on chalk/man made snow. The Kessler is definitely my fastest board but that isn't base structure. After waxing the board and riding for a day, only the outer inch of wax on either side shows any wear. Even in spring conditions, when I'm riding the un-structured Coilers at a resort (with any sensible amount of pitch), I can't say that I'd be willing to shell out for getting base structure to get maybe a little bit extra oomph when I've got my board running almost flat on a catwalk. #3 again depends a lot on your local conditions and riding-style. For the side edge: Pow: who cares Packed-pow: edges are nice but you don't need to obsess Ideal conditions, ie Chalk/Man-made: trade edge sharpness with maintainability (sharper ie 87deg will give noticibley more grip but it wears noticibly faster) Ice: sharp! My two Coilers have 89 deg side edges and they hold up really well through a whole season (maybe two), predictable grip on pretty much anything. The Kessler has 87 (because that's how I got it) and it really has razor handling on almost anything, but I do touch-up work on the edges every couple of weeks when I'm really riding that board. For the bottom bevel that is dependent how you ride and your skillz. A bottom bevel will buy you a little margin of safety regarding catching a "wrong" side edge. You remember your first year of snowboarding when you were sliding perpendicular to the board and caught an edge then either made you scorpion or slam the back or you head in the ground? Race skis typically have from 0 to 1deg bevel (starting with 0 to a little bevel for slower-technical events (SL) and progressing to more bevel for speed events GS-->Super-G-->DH) , recreational skis/snowboards typically have 1 to 2 degree. If you ride really really fast you might just want some base bevel because the consequences are that much worse. My two Coiler's have 0 bevel and that has worked fine for me the past 3 to 4 years. All of the above is from a recreational carver's perspective. Racer's will have a different view of things.

I’ll back up using 0 deg on the base. I’ve got a couple of Coiler’s that just work so well with the “factory tune” that I don’t want to f* it up. I’m sure things like early rise nose/tail have a bigger helping effect than the base bevel.

That makes me feel old... and a geek.

I'm guessing that the binding suck problem is mainly cosmetic. I mean if we are riding with the style that we have always longed for, the percent of time that the middle of the base is touching the snow is fractional. I start the season by scraping and rewaxing the whole base. But mid-season I usually just need to rewax the outer inch or so, and only rarely the middle.

And how do they still wind up so far in debt?! I mean, when I steal fruit from the fruit baskets of the other departments at my job, I save it in a special fruit drawer in my desk. So that I always have fruit available. Just in case.

#!%@#¤%!!!!! THAT is NOT a SPADE you IDIOT!!!! That is a SQUARE POINT SHOVEL!!!! THIS IS A @¤(/&!"#&!ING SPADE!!!

I don't know if that was a spelling error or not, and at this point I'm too scared to ask.