st_lupo

Awesome to see folks with tons of snow! @crackaddict which part of the US (or world) is that?

Yikes, bad memories of when I switched to hardboots. I found that what works best for me is to always buckle in standing and starting from toe-side. Or like OJ said flip over from heelside to toeside.

Okay this is total bragging, but after a few years of crap winters, our corner of Norway is finally having a decent winter (sorry Alps). Aaand some mornings are totally worth getting up early enough to take first (and second) tracks. -22C so most people stayed indoors with their fireplaces roaring. So what do you all see out of the window, first thing in the morning? Okay, this was right when I was leaving for the slope at about 08.20.

I've got a similar set of gear: RC10, F2 RaceTi, and board waists around 19.5 to 20. My MP size is a bit different though (29) so I typically ride pretty high angles (actually probably higher than is strictly necessary, but I guess my technique just evolved around that). I am definitely _not_ in the clickity-clickity camp. My setup evolved quickly from taking a baseline survey from other folks who ride similar setups and then making a few small adjustments to give me equal amounts of trouble on both heel and toe side turns. Everything from that point onwards I attribute to technique. As a reference point this is what works for me on my slalom board and slightly bigger freecarving board: Bindings: Front 65deg smallest toe shim (lift, not cant) Back 60 Big heel shim Smallest inwards cant (this really surprised me to see that there today, doubt I need it but it doesn't seem to be negatively impacting my riding in any significant way) 50 - 51 cm stance, centered on the boards natural setback This setup gives me good freedom of movement to place my mass center exactly where I want it forward/aftward on the board Boots: Liners: Intuition Power Wraps (the stock liners were causing my feet to literally bleed by the end of the day). 0 cant on the cuffs For me the following is the single biggest factor to my riding Front boot: lock in ride mode so that the edge of the metal plate is flush with the edge of the boot cuff by the locking lever. I think you will know what I mean when you see it. Front boot: lock in ride mode so that _one_ click of metal plate is exposed below the edge of the boot cuff (slight extra foreward-lean). It isn't necessarily that those ride-mode settings are exactly right for you, but that boot lean setting (for me) has a bigger impact on my riding than everything else combined (given you have a comfortable stance to begin with), and it wasn't until I stopped adjusting it to compensate for variations in poor toe or heel side carves that I finally had a stable point to develop my technique. How you buckle your boot can be important too! For me I always jam my heel into the pocket by banging the heel of the boot into the ground a couple of times after I have put it on. Then I tighten the middle buckle first. The working upwards from the middle buckle, I tighten the two buckles on the cuff. Finally, working downwards from the middle buckle, I buckle the two remaining buckles. I replaced the upz top-strap with Booster straps and _love_ them. Straps go _between_ the liner and the shell. I'm not familiar with your board but I can imagine that a 9m SCR board handles like a whippet so maybe that is part of the problem? Things will happen a lot quicker on a small SCR board than compared to something with a 12-13m SCR. It always takes me a day or two to adjust to my 162 Kessler.

Those heel-sides… can I have an amen? Anybody ever look into hip reduction surgery?

Crap, I’m pretty sure in the early 90’s a Vail ticket was sub $100. That’s almost twice the price adjusted for inflation.

Eww, semicolons! Statements end at column 72, like God intended

At the local hill the line to the chair lift gets crammed up by about 11:00, with virtually nobody on the tbar. I can usually get more runs per hour switching over to the tbar for the following hour or so. And after switching to hard boots (with pretty steep angles), I've found that the tbar isn't so bad. Plus, if you are tight with the liftie here, you can usually ride the tbar about 20 minutes before the chairlift is open.

No no no. It's an album cover for one of Big Black's releases. My parent's would have hated the name of the album but Big Black is awesome if you love the noisier side of post-punk. Listened to it not too long ago and it still holds up well. It's got Steve Albini, so you know it's legit. As a kid, that CD cover always caught my eye, but I thought it was rap, so it took a few years and a friend's recommendation before I listened to it.

Bummer, but awesome picture. Big White, not to be confused with…

That picture should be your avatar!

I’ll also put this out there since you are on a student budget and might get tempted… If you ever consider buying used bindings, check them over really, really well. Bindings are consumable in this sport. Bails, t-nuts, etc can and do break!

Imagine the fun you could have if the wood grain ran the other way!

#lifegoals

The craziest thing is that our local ski hill has had a reputation of purposely refusing to stop reckless skiers/snowboards in all but the most heinous instances because they they think they are doing a public service: "If the at-risk teenagers are at the hill screwing around, at least they aren't down in the town and getting into even bigger trouble."

The Winter Stick looks like it should be called the stoned snake

There once was a snowboarder named Dave Who loved to carve through the alpine snow With his board on the slope He carved with such hope Leaving a trail that was pure as the driven snow. Tried as hard as I could but this is the spiciest limerick that it would serve up.

Chatgpt is pretty cool! I’ve asked it some pretty niche questions and got impressively correct (if at times superficial) answers. It’s crazy how correct and in-depth it gets regarding comp-sci stuff.

Are you sure you had playback on 4k? On my phone playback always defaults to 480p or something and looks like crap, but going into the settings and setting it to 4k is a huge difference I think. Here are is a screen capture from youtube with the original material straight off the phone. Here it is after processing through topaz labs. The end result isn't maybe 35mm quality, but it is a dramatic improvement from the source imho.

No Outrigger Technique Sick rides!!! I was sooo close pulling the trigger on a big Virus this year, but I trashed my MTB early this season. One new frame later and my family is still eating rice and beans for dinner.

If anybody needs a pick-me-up, Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger is next up on my list.

I don't think think this is too surprising for anybody involved in snow sports or even summer sports for that matter. When I first moved to Kongberg we were having winters with -30C weather, now we are pretty lucky to go under -10C. It has been a loooooong time since natural snow was enough for the local bump and now the local dams are getting really low so running the snow cannons is going to be a more challenging prospect (we have had more rain than usual this year though which will help). During the summer months, it is extremely obvious that a lot of the usual creeks and swamps have really dried up. It IS awesome for mountain biking but extremely worrying for the planet!

Hope nobody minds that I'm reviving this thread but I just have to give some props to a very cool (but relatively expensive at $200) video tool. The Topaz Labs Video Enhance AI SW is pretty bloody impressive at upscaling both the picture resolution and framerate. And when I say pretty bloody impressive, I mean this is like the spy movies where they zoom video into the license plate of a car from 5 miles away, press "enhance" and suddenly get a crystal-clear number. The following edit is made off of some video I had posted on here a few years back, but I used the Topaz Labs SW to upscale the source material from 720p/24fps to 4k/240fps (but playback in the edit is at 60fps). There are some artifacts here and there (high-speed movement in a relatively low source framerate is difficult) and the some of the upscaling lends it a bit of a cell-shaded look (but there are tons of parameters that can be tweaked). The real upshot is that youtube's encoding doesn't slaughter 4k 60fps video like it does 720p/24fps. (you can see the original source material (from kvitfjell) on the same youtube channel) for an example of what YT encoding does to low-rez video.

That is peak snow-sports season?! Looks more like peak bike-park season. I'm a little nervous about our local bump that just splashed out on a new high-speed 6-seater with wind-shield and heated seats. Energy prices in Europe are going to skyrocket this winter and the water reservoirs that supply the snow cannons have been shrinking every year for the past 3 or 4 years.