Xargo

Fresh vid from this morning. Helmet mounted 360-cam this time because I rode alone. I think the hand placement is a bit better now but still some cleaning up to do. Conditions were much better than usual so had a lot of fun: 3 weeks of riding left.

Inspecting some cord: That's how it looks like when it's good but sadly it's been pretty inconsistent and there can be places like this: Groomed using Pistenbully 400 (at least I haven't seen other models here at Ruka, Finland). Almost everything is groomed 7 days a week.

Sweet! How much EE does that beast have? I hope Bruce isn't too annoyed by my pestering every time I see these wide Contras posted here. I'm hoping 136cm EE, 300mm waist 16m radius softy Contra would soon be reality.

My racing coach called this "Fakie backside eurocarve". Does this qualify?

Thanks all! Yeah I do agree I have to work to get lower especially for the toeside and position my arms better. Now I'm taking a bit of a break letting my hands rest a bit during the Easter when slopes are too busy. Time to watch some more instructional videos. That Ben's video is a classic. Also I don't have any of those fancy slippery gloves or such so my hands tend to stick to the snow a lot but I'm looking to try some rubber coating next.

I got my first alpine board (second hand Coiler ECVC) just over two years ago and ever since I've been wanting to learn EC. Below is a video from this week and still some cleaning to do but pretty happy with the riding now. Time to spend the rest of the season (still over a full month left here) mostly enjoying the turns and less tryharding. This is with Contra ECC. Technique improvement tips are still very welcome though. At least one thing I need to learn is to start the toeside turn lower.

Hehe.. thought I'd give it a go but quickly realized I don't have enough speed and just tried to somehow get up again and ended up doing some kinda butter, I think. I've been able to do laid down 360 flatland carves earlier but without standing back up so now I want to practice that. Great tips in this thread! Though maybe I'll also try to clean that butter up and try to invent some kind of laid down carve into nose butter thingy (not claiming this carve to be laid down, there wasn't enough speed). Pretty much the only thing I dislike about this board is a bit soft nose but that could be good for butters... need to experiment more.

Couldn't agree more with what @Eastsiiiide wrote. In fact I was just going to post a video about my recent duckfoot carving but I think I'll just post it here to illustrate this very point you made. This is with 50 degrees angle difference between the boots. The reason for that is that these vintage Elfgen bindings I used have minimum angle setting of 25. These of course are "hardboots" (softer than stiff softboots though) but angles are very much softboot kinda angles, if "a bit" extreme: Anyways, the edge control precision you get with low angles is just so addictive but the important bit for which I'm very grateful for the input of alpine riders is using the hip to control the heelside carve. Low binding angles and hip rotation combined is so much fun.

Reminds me of this:

A picture is worth thousand words but how many quiz answers? I did ask the guy who manages that ski resort park/superpipe if it's ok to wallride the superpipe and carve around the park and the answer I got was that the more people use the features, the more budget we get to build and maintain them so go for it! Apparently I didn't ruin the superpipe enough last season though since they haven't made it this season. ... just kidding, this has been a terrible snow season so they had to use the snowmaking budget elsewhere I think. That said, might be different for different places and I would definitely not go trench the landings and such unless I jump and then of course wait for my turn the same as any other park rider. Carving around the features should be fine imo. if you don't block the approach of the guys actually using the features. So my take is that when in doubt, ask.

Excellent stuff! That concave bit made me extra jealous. It can be so irritating to get a good grip for deep turns when the slope is convex.

It's a bit hard to see from the binding disc pic but if the disc is not symmetric, you could try to rotate it 180 degrees and then use the adjustment range to move to bindings as much towards the toe edge like possible like you have done now. From the pic it looks to me like the groove goes a little bit closer to the edge of the disc on one side. As far as the riding is concerned, I agree with what James said. Compression is important. At the beginning of the turn your chest can almost touch your knees while your hips should rotate towards the nose, then you make a really aggressive early edge change (using the down unweighting the compression gives you) and then you can extend your legs to apply edge pressure. It's a matter of style you are looking for how much extension you should do and how early. For laid down style you want to go extend a lot early on but then if you hit a bump, you will be in trouble. If you are looking for a smooth carving experience, extend throughout the turn and also continue rotating during the turn. When you have fully rotated, that's when your turn should end. I struggle a lot with this personally and tend to not continue the rotation which causes me to lose grip and the edge starts to chatter. *edit* I don't know if those bindings allow highback rotation but if possible, try to rotate them so that the highback lines with the heel edge as closely as possible. Also don't use much forward lean for the front binding since you need to be able to have your front leg pretty upright for the compression with forward stance.

I have two of these. The smallest (153) and the biggest (167). I first got the big one and liked it so much that I got the smallest one to jib around with as well. Recently I've been riding the big Timeless more again and I made this kind of comparison which I think fits this topic quite well: So the first run is with Contra ECC using +47/+57 angles and the second run is with Timeless using -25/+25 angles. Boots are the same and that's what I really really like about this combo, no need to change boots when going from alpine to duck. ... and just to further illustrate how the boot material really isn't the point, here's an older vid with a Timeless softboot (Salomon Quantum + Malamute) setup. The stance is narrower but otherwise close to the vid above: The 167 Timeless is 275mm waist so that forces me to go pretty extreme angles with the duck setup so now I'm trying to order my dream duck stance carving board which would be around 300mm waist with a bigger sidecut radius. Big Timeless is 12m but I'm pretty sure it doesn't take into account the smaller radius sections near the nose and tail which I don't really like since they can hook nastily when riding like this. 16m should be fun.

Dunno how I missed this but better late than never. I have couple of reasons why I like Hawx more than alpine snowboard boots. The most important bit is flex. I also have Swoard EC12 boots and while they offer very very nice customizable flex back and forth, they don't flex sideways the way I would like. For high binding angles they are great but not so much for duck stance for an example. That said, even Track 700s work with duck stance better than I expected but Hawx are just amazing for that. Another thing I like about Hawx is the lower ride height. It's still taller than I would like but better than alpine snowboard boots. Lately I've been riding about 50% duck and now I can ride my EC board with +47/+57 angles when groomers are fresh and then switch to -25/+25 duck setup without changing boots. I still like EC12s a lot and use them with my narrower boards. DGSS works with Hawx Ultra XTD but since XTDs are meant to be unbuckled when hiking, the ankle pivot is rather sensitive to how tight you buckle. The way I'm now riding is that the top buckle is pretty tight, then the second buckle is really loose (to not restrict the pivot), the third buckle is pretty tight to prevent heel lift and the toe buckle is pretty loose not to pinch my toes too much. That brings me to the toe box which can be pretty tight when using F2 bindings. That's because the shell is really flexible so the toe box gets pinched a bit by the bindings. I also have vintage Elfgen bindings and those don't pinch the toes that much. Those have 5mm bails and no problems thus far. F2 heel bail also is too tall and I put some foam under the heel to fix that and it also cushions the ride a bit more. Punching the toe box shouldn't be a problem at all because the whole shell can be heat molded with the memoryfit process. Factory fit works for me but I did change the liner to Palau overlap since I like overlap more and the standard liner was also quite heavy. It's starting to look like Hawx might replace my softboots totally but they won't replace EC12s. Lower ride height is the only reason I can think of why I would choose to ride sooftboots rather than the Hawx setup. Of course there are way stiffer Hawx models available than the 95 flex I bought but this soft flex works very well for me.

Yeah I've been thinking a lot about all kinds of hybrid gear setups and also experimented with combining hardboot stuff with softboot stuff. Yesterday I rode this kind of setup and it was a blast. So good that I'm going to ride that again tomorrow: I didn't expect that to work as well as it did since those bindings allow minimum angle of 25 so I had to go -25/+25 duck which I thought would be crazy but it was much better than I anticipated. Yesterday I first rode Contra with +47/+57 angles and when the conditions got more choppy I switched to that Ride Timeless and continued to have a blast. Those boots are setup pretty soft, so now I can kinda ride alpine and "softboots" without switching boots and get to have quick to use bindings for both boards. Agreed and it's the edge to edge control I miss the most when riding forward stance. Of course I have ridden way way more with duck stance but to me a wide board with a duck stance feels much quicker edge to edge than a GS board with forward stance for an instance. I'm pretty new to riding alpine gear though. Only two seasons. The interesting thing is that I feel my duck stance riding has developed a lot after learning how to ride alpine gear and the most bizarre thing for me is that suddenly my duck switch riding also feels a lot easier even though I haven't practiced that at all. I guess it's because I have learned to use my hips better.

Sorry for spamming these vids but I had such a blast with the setup I posted about above and I feel like this is relevant for this topic so here goes (not my cleanest run but not the point here): So that is standard Ride Timeless 167 board but with gecko style carbon plates, old Elfgen plate bindings and Atomic Hawx Ultra XTD 95 W boots modified with DGSS springs. Now the reason why I post a vid about "hardboot" setup in a softboot thread is that like I mentioned previously somewhere else, I feel like the material of the boots shouldn't be the deciding factor but it would be more useful to talk about stance differences for an instance. I used -25/+25 duck stance in this vid (the lowest that Elfgen bindings allow) and I had just ridden an alpine setup with +47/+57 angles before this. Was interesting to ride those back to back. I still had some toe overhang with this duck setup but heelside was pretty good. So a dedicated (custom) carving board is the obvious update to get rid of that overhang since I can't possible go for steeper duck angles (this was already pretty bonkers). So my advice is to first go for what you have and when you hit the limits of what you can do with your gear, get new gear which overcomes the problems you have identified with your current gear. There's also a "real softboot" duck stance vid with that board in my channel for reference but it isn't that different since the stance is almost the same. This setup gave a lot more progressive flex though and I liked this test so much that I'm probably going to tinker this setup further.

Tight between bindings.

I haven't ridden any Korua boards but I have Nidecker Tracer which I guess has some of the same vibe. I had that board before riding any alpine boards and here's some footage with a duck stance (-21/+21) when I was just starting to practice alpine riding around the same time: The thing I still like the most about that kind of riding is the sensation of driving the board with your toes and heels. Sadly as you can see, there's too much overhang which limits the riding. After having learned how to ride with alpine stance, I took the Tracer out again this season (so basically after two seasons of hardboot practice and here's how it looks now): Obviously the slope is different, the conditions are different, boots are different, stance is different and bindings are different but board is the same. Here I setup the angles so that the back foot has zero overhang and then put around 10 degrees more for the front foot. I totally agree with James that a good rule of thumb is to set the back boot angle so that you don't boot out (so it can have overhang when you are still learning and not booting out yet) and then set the front boot a bit higher angle and how much higher depends on your personal preference. Anyway, I hope this shows that under 8m scr board can handle a lot and also how different binding angles affect the riding since now I like to ride both duck and positive angles. Actually tomorrow morning I'm going to hit morning groomers with an extremecarving board (so positive angles) and after couple of runs I'm going to switch to this: Should be fun. I guess my main point is that a lot of things can work when carving.

This! I rode my Contra ECC (174 x 16m, 247 waist) yesterday and then switched to Völkl AFC (154 x 7.9, 252 waist) with same boot setup and stance. Contra ofc is way stiffer and longer with much bigger scr and tons of more ee. I did expect a big difference but still it surprised me how slow I had to ride to get rid of the heelside chatter with the AFC. Of course this works the other way around as well. If you are used to ride "normal" boards, it can take a while to find the aggressiveness needed to really drive those stiff big scr boards (like James is riding in the vid). The thing is that before I had ridden alpine gear, I thought the AFC was overly stiff. Now that thought just feels amusing. Anyways, it was a fun test and now I appreciate the Contra even more. Also that back arm forward advice is great but with low binding angles it's possible to overdo it (tail can lose grip) but reaching for front leg does sound about right.

Yeah sun can be peculiar when you are north from the Arctic Circle. Sunrise and sunset within one session is entirely possible that time of year. Most of these clips are around 10-11am. Funny you mentioned Serena Ski since that's what I see when I look out from my living room window. Small world, eh. Nice place but as you said, only enough space for couple of turns in a run. I just got a new helmet and now I'm looking for a big fake mohawk to attach to the top of the helmet. Moar hair, the better.

Had an amazing trip recently to Pyhä ski resort and now had time to edit some of my favorite clips together so here it is:

No experience about Link levers but Hawx Ultra XTDs are working great for me with DGSS. The ankle movement range is much less than with Backlands though but my Ultras have now already lasted much longer than two pairs of Backland Carbon (BOA model). Btw. it was much easier to take the freelock pin away from Hawx shell than from Backland Carbons. Much less friction with the Hawx.

A bit too soft even for my liking (I really liking carving soft groomers in general) yesterday at Ruka but good for trenching:

Finally got an opportunity to try wide enough board that I didn't have to worry about boot outs with a -18/+18 duck stance. The board was Elevated Surf Craft Salmon and here's some footage: I rode the board for three runs and now I'm even more convinced that around 30cm waist board is what I want. Salmon was 31.1cm waist and due to a tight sidecut, some 33cm under the bindings. I don't need that much width but it didn't feel too wide either. I do want a much longer radius sidecut though and prolly a bit more effective edge (this had 112cm). Stock Salomon Malamute boots and stock Salomon Quantum bindings. Saw some new footage of your riding from Ryan's channel @crackaddict, looking good! Do you have more?

Bending F2 Eliminator 166W WC this morning: