kitejumping

Always nice to watch bigger sidecut turns, you really get to slow down the movements a bit and have time to enjoy each turn a bit more.

It counts as snowboarding to me. Being able to do many variations of every turn regular and switch and go between the two effortlessly I think is part of being a well rounded snowboarder. Cool clip, one of the better ones I've seen with switch turns on such a forward stance.

I think if I was forced to go back to anything smaller than a 12m sidecut I would just give up snowboarding and only ride my 16-21m sidecut radius skis. I ride a 20m sidecut though so that would be a very big drop. Here's some clips on it getting warmed up for the season on poor quality grooming with not much open over the weekend. https://www.reddit.com/r/snowboarding/s/1YQppzshXU

Nice turns in the video! I ride 15, -15 duck stance as well. On toesides pointing the back knee forward to me is about increasing ground clearance (so you don't knee out in the snow). Similar to rock climbing how you have to point your knees to the side to keep your center of gravity close to the wall, the same applies to get your body lower on toesides without your knees touching the snow. I don't ride super stiff boots or bindings, so it allows for more side to side play and rotation, probably more like surfing, vs the idea that you need super stiff boots and bindings. I think if your body positioning is good and everything is in alignment you don't need a crazy stiff boot / binding softboot setup to carve aggressively (but you do need a stiff, wide board and very sharp edges).

Ah yeah, I could have been more clear on the joke part, but that's more about any board you could buy from a snowboard shop these days in a resort town (most don't sell hardboots) if someone tries to push a rider towards a park board, vs pipe board, vs powder board, vs all mountain or carving board and they say you need a specific board or you can't ride a specific type of terrain. All the boards are capable of making it through anything under a good rider. Zeb Powell is the perfect example proving this with all the crazy park stuff he has done on his super ultra mega blossom board which is 100% the opposite of what a park board is traditionally known as. The board isn't going to self destruct if it enters the wrong terrain, it just might require way more skill from the rider to make it work.

One board to rule them all for me as well. I ride a similarly spec'd board as RK in a similar style, for me certain terrain just makes things that are super easy on some terrain way harder to do, usually due to conditions limitations. For example, with a 20m sidecut, on black diamond runs it takes a very wide run to close your turns and keep your speed in check, and wide black diamond runs are pretty rare. So when you have a black diamond steep run that is narrow, you can only get two or maybe 3 open carved turns in before you are going 40mph+ and need to speed check (in most conditions, since steep runs tend to get scraped away and turn into race snow). On the rare occurrence that the snow is perfect for carving then I can decamber the board (the snow lets it dig in without losing an edge) and make it make turns more in the 14m radius range, which opens up doing a lot more linked turns together on that same terrain and also takes care of the acceleration problem. All of this would be super easy in comparison on a 12m sidecut board, but then you don't get to have as much fun doing big turns on wide less steep terrain. Trees and moguls the sidecut doesn't really matter so my boards limitations really only apply to trying to make agressive carved turns on steep hardpack with marginal conditions. Since usually the steep groomers are quickly destroyed by high speed skidded turners and full of dangerous missiles that usually haven't learned to turn or stop yet, board choice that's ideal for the blue and green groomers wins. The whole idea that you need an all mountain board to ride trees and moguls I think is kind of an industry joke since those are pretty basic skills all good snowboarders have, I've even seen hardbooters ride trees and moguls just fine (although yes it is much less forgiving and probably more for that 100 day plus group lol)

I put in more than 100 days a season and actually had to warranty my first ultra carbon flagship well before that since I popped the base graphic out of it between the mountain logo as I guess it couldn't hold up to how much I was flexing it like a toy. To be fair I did the same thing to another brand of board as well (if companies don't use a single piece for the base under the front heel where all the pressure from your heelside turn goes, the two pieces tend to pop apart over time, maybe due to all the board decambering and pressure on that spot). Any carving boards should have no die cuts under the main part of the sintered base lol. I get that relative to his other boards it's way stiffer but the mainstream brand boards are way too flexy to push properly for aggressive soft boot carvers. I think it's probably great for JJ to carve on since he weighs less and has smaller boots, but the specs across the different sized boards in the same series don't really scale properly and the sidecuts are all pretty tight. I know there are videos of him racing hardboots back in the day so he is capable of more aggressive carving but none of the boards in his lineup are great dedicated carving boards IMHO, more like low edge angle slower cruising carvers. Probably because if they made a truly awesome carving board most people wouldn't be able to ride it and they wouldn't sell many, so the one size fits most approach applies and we get mediocre generic boards from all the brands that are pretty good for powder, trees, park, and moguls, but leave a lot to be desired for carving.

I've been running it since the kickstarter in 2017, based on epic app tracking have about 6 million vertical feet on it since then across many boards. V1 was good enough, applied it on all my boards with the kits, V2 was better, faster in all temps and I think significantly faster in warm spring conditions than any all temp wax I have ever used (although when I used to trade boards with RK at breck his temp specific waxes were slightly faster). V3 I heard had some application issues so on my new board last season opted for a shop that still had some v2 stock. Since they came out with phantom cure boxes at shops I just have them apply it as it's usually only about 20 bucks extra vs doing it yourself and I'm not sure how well the kits would cover the huge area of my boards. The biggest difference is consistency on long days of 30k vert, it feels exactly the same at the end of the day vs the start, whereas normal wax can wear off and the edges get sticky by the end of the day. You can also wax over it and still get the benefits of wax till it wears off, but in general it's good enough where I never bother waxing. Initially, with the kits I used a base cleaner before doing it followed by isopropyl alcohol, but I think they typically recommend a stone grind now before applying it so it really soaks in. The hard part with applying it yourself in winter is it needs a long cure time with bright sunlight and non freezing temps. Here's a video of me riding with phantom on my board. https://youtu.be/zHss4j2v1pg

It better be stiffer than the flagship, my carbon flagship felt like a kids butter toy rental board vs my current Donek. I guess it was fitting for the small sidecut and width it had though to keep it easy to fly through moguls and trees.

I usually run 0 degree base and a 5 degree side edge. The 5 degree side feels amazing when it's fresh but still debating if there is enough of a difference vs a 3 degree side to go with a 5 since it doesn't stay sharp as long. Super sharp edges for me turn mediocre snow days or ice days into hero snow, it's just so much smoother of a feeling slicing through the hardback with super sharp edges and knowing that when you stop a rotation and lock in the edge its not going to unexpectedly break away on you. Same with pushing the carves harder and using higher edge angles. I have my own sharpening tools though and usually redo the edges every week or two depending on how much I'm riding. Can't comment on base maintenance since I apply DPS phantom when the board is new with no wax then do pretty much nothing (no wax needed) for the life of the board. If the snow is dirty in the spring occasionally I brush the dirt out to refresh the phantom treatment.

Also now about 10 min away (moved here from CO). Hope to find the local group of carvers (if there is one here) to ride with this winter at PCMR. I ski as well so maybe will get a DV pass one day but their pricing is a bit steep, especially if I can't ever snowboard there. It's weird that the MIDA grant they used for development allows them to exclude such a large group of snowsports enthusiasts.

Some clips from Beaver Creek this spring, mostly from Easter morning. Have been working on that knapton smooth snowboarding style.

Perfect grooming last Sunday at Beaver creek upper mountain.

Sounds like BC grooming is better than aspen currently based on that other thread. Me enjoying the groomers