CarvCanada

A lot of the data comes from glaciers which store information that's "frozen in time" for the last few thousand years.That said I really don't believe we're advanced enough to put together all those millions of factors and fluctuating formulas... I don't pay attention to the way the media hypes "climate change" but nobody can argue against the fact that we put too many contaminants everywhere.

I Read the link and learned some stuff, I like the fact that there's all these conflicting views out there, I'll try to read State of Fear, I agree that way too much emphasis is put on Global Warming in media as opposed to massive widespread industrial contamination of water and air with non-natural chemicals, but I think the difference between eugenics and global warming is that, whether or not we are helping to cause it (and whether or not changing our entire infrastructure will even do ANYthing to reverse it), I would argue that it's really not in the best interest of those in power to do anything about pollution since it'll slow our economy down, and any consequences that come out of new laws being passed etc. will really only help the environment (unless there are hidden motives behind laws being passed, but that's unlikely since they'll undoubtedly hold back industry)... as opposed to when people in power supported eugenics it was definately in their interest to hype it up with propaganda and get it an undisputed mindset Here's a fact that the media really doesn't play on and I guess people just want it "in the past": air conditioners and other ****, when researching what chemical to synthesize, came up with quite a few. While they ended up choosing CFC-12 which goes up into the ozone and catalyzes O3's breaking apart pretty effectively, another option was CFC-13 which luckily was decided against (I'm not sure why). Later on it was found out that CFC-13 catalyzes O3's destruction thousands of times faster than CFC12 mol for mol! We got pretty lucky! Even after the Montreal Protocol there is still way too much **** up there though.

You can't really argue that we pollute way too much though. Some things are way too hyped/manipulated but it's for sure that there's way too much contamination going on.

I find all Atmospheric Science pretty awesome and I'm really into reading up on all of that, there's a lot of really cool research out there to read. All my professors agree that it's probably a mix of both natural cycles and humans spreading ****, and all we know is that climates are predictably unpredictable. We definately need to cut down CO2 as well as all the little quantities of dirty-ass chemicals that don't belong on earth at all like CFC-12 and other polutants. In glaciers scientists have mapped out temperature vs. CO2 in the atmosphere for the past few thousand years and found that its really really corelates, and CO2 is the highest its ever been right now. CFC-12 has stopped being produced but it will live up there for quite a while. There's even clouds (noctilucent clouds - they're beautiful!) that are being formed in the mesosphere in record rates that hardly ever existed before. People started noticing them in the 1800's after bigass volcanic eruptions that emitted CO2.... and now they seem to be forming a lot without the push of volcanic eruptions. Who knows if they existed a lot but people never really noticed them before... We're even discovering only in the last 20 years that there's huge (but faint) lightning blasts that fire up from large stormclouds into the stratosphere and fan out at altitudes of up to 90km! They go up in either big red cones (Red Sprites) or blue collumns (Blue Jets). Humans don't know too much, we're still pretty low tech!

that's at the top... go down 200ft and you get brushed by needles constantly :) you can sort of see it in the picture. imagine 95% of terrain being as tight as the mountain in the background (Jay Peak) It's tight enough that every once and a while you pick a wrong line and get stuck between trees and have to swim. It's fun! When you only see max 20 ft in front of you, you often end up picking lines where you end up in a hole with trees all around you laughing and your friends go by and some of them fall in the same trap. I'd bet the Fish would be so awesome in there, I'd like to pick one up and split it one day. For now a 165 Prior works good. Couldn't imagine going 168+cm RUFF in the jungle!

The Fish was designed and tested with this as the backyard: trees are REALLY tight in vermont

you're not gonna be aggressively carving turns where you're double arming the slopes though with a neutral stance i think by saying "facing the nose" he really meant facing in the direction of the high angles of alpine stance in comparison to facing the waist axis with a neutral stance. for me its more like facing the nose on heelside and facing a little lower than my binding angles on toeside while in hardboots What board/setup are you getting? Maybe try riding a stiff freeride board with something like 40/30 angles before trying hardboots. When I ride a set-up like that, I'm never completely facing the nose. On heelsides I probably face my chest /shoulders at 45 degrees and on toesides probably at 30 degrees. To visualize this, imagine on heelsides having your rear arm pointing straight down to your waist as if you're almost grabbing indy while the front arm points a bit outside the nose. On toesides front hand is pretty much in line with binding angles while rear arm is bent and held up near shoulders (cause your low to the snow :) ! Trying to face the nose with a lower stance, it just seems wrong, the board will chatter, the tail will want to break free, your knees won't be bent comfortably. But yeah i think you meant facing "forwards" with an alpine stance, which is really fun. Double arming the slope is real nice and you can definately do it in softies, just with higher angles.

Carving softies felt great when there was fresh on the surface, but when it was really packed the limits were too low. I loved the feel of softboots, but steep hardpack just wasn't happening. I also carved the nose off my old 159 literally 3 years ago Found Bomber and also saw quite a few people on the hill and spoke to shop guys who were into it, got some Suzukas and tried it out and it was perfect on the hardpack. Really like the feel, also like the stance especially the feeling of having both arms out front, dropping the rear knee on the way out of carves, and allowing for some nice Method grab on toeside and indy on heelside. Such power and flow! I do miss using my calf muscles to ride though, without them there's a certain feel that's missing on toesides and when sliding turns. I also don't care too much for lightning quick edge changes. I think with stiffer and stiffer soft bindings/boots and these tanks that are coming out and getting better like Prior ATV, I will be riding softboots in the future most of the time. They seem to come close to the edgehold power of hardboots in packed powder and they won't toss you around in chopped snow. On steepish hardpack though there will have to be some sweet technology pumped into those BX boards to match what my Donek171 has got

I bet that 500000 years ago when the appalachians and laurentians were gigantic, there would have been some AWESOME snowboarding... :)

" and the wipeouts are spectacular!" hahaha It would be awesome to see a judged carving event of style, power and flow at the X-games or something, it might catch on if there were some inspiring riders who got exposure

OT: Do you guys think this would improve racing's popularity/fun/progression: 1- everyone wears regular snowboard jackets and pants (I guess there would have to be a list of acceptable stuff, so people won't wear aero'd out shells) 2- in GS, gates are closer together vertical wise and wider apart across the fall line (to make GS a bit slower, and much lower in the cross through sections, and have the cross-under sections low carves as well) I really have no idea if this would work just wondering

just read back some posts and realize people are talking about racing as well.... in my above post I should say that softboots are weak in 2 areas: steep eastcoast hardpack and race courses (almost the same thing :( ) I didn't even consider racing. I like to watch it and really respect racers, it would definately make me a better carver if I raced but I would never be able to do it... I'd just be smiling the whole time and wondering why I'm not ripping on a clear groomer, wouldn't be able to get pumped up at all because I can't take any sort of competition seriously for some reason. (I'm the dude who's laughing and can't understand why everyone's so serious when I accidentaly score on my own net in soccer, or when skaters start heckling me to stop riding in their area OT- Why the hell do board sports spawn so many little cliques with attitude!!!?

hmm, well what can't you do in softboots? I'm betting that with a 2-board, 1-boot quiver (something like, PriorATV and MFR, along with Malamutes/Drivers/Synapses) you could do anything you wanted very well, except on steep eastcoast hardpack. Yeah yeah edge-to edge is slower, but some people like that feel and it all comes down to what feels good. I love the feel of softboot carving. I like the floatier/snappier feel in softer packed pow. I also love the on-rails feel of rutting up eastcoast hardpacked snow on 57/54 hardboots, but when I move out West I'm moving towards softboots with ATV type board, and MFR type board with more like 45/25

since snow is relatively soft, i bet that at a certain edge angle, you could be carving at a range of radii (yeah i'm a mix of one of those engineer types and "feel" types, did a project relating board design to carving technique for school, yay!) if you're feathering it at a 45 degree edge angle, your board's tip and tail sections of the sidecut radius are taking a good portion of the pressure, whereas your waist isn't diggin' in too hard if you start really pushing it dynamically and hold huge carves at 45 degrees, your tip and tail are taking less of the total pressure, and your waist is being forced hard into the snow. your tip and tail are still just a bit dug into the snow, they're mainly just guiding the board, whereas your waist is maybe 3-4 cm deeper into the snow (as long as it's not bulletproof ice) bitting hard, decreasing turning radius.

yah, Gaspesie, Chics Chocs. Seems to be some bowls with over 2000ft vertical, most of it treeless

Derf check this out! It's in Quebec! You could fool someone into thinking it's Utah too bad it's so hard to get to, the only options (if you dont drive a stinky ass snowmobile) are to get snowmobiled in by guides for 225$ a day! or to splitboard, which I don't have,and can't justify paying 1200$ unless I lived right near there

i have 3 of those dvd's, don't worry!

can't decide! bozeman looks tempting too, and they have a program called "snow science" that focuses a lot on avalanches and leads to avalanche work. Organic Chemistry just is not working for me here in Montreal. Hey at least McGill placed top 10 in playboy's list of best party universities. ( i haven't even seen a rez, let alone even drank since university started) I wonder where University of Alaska Anchorage placed :)

Side note - what would a safer standard bail set-up, one that is fairly easy to close and only takes a swift motion from one hand to close, or setting the bails tight, taking 2 hands and levering with your palms to close the bail (this flexes the boot a bit)? Thanks for opinions. Mine is set-up so that it takes both hands, but isn't too hard to lever with your palm to shut them, it feels really solid. It does flex the boot (mainly downwards, compressing the rubber pads) a bit but I'm sure this is good, keeping the toeclips pushing down on the top of the boot. I ask since I notice most racers, when unclipping, they just need to slap their toeclips with 2 fingers and they're off. This is odd, since I would really think that with bails that aren't really pushing down on the boot, any real bump would compress the bottom rubber pads of the boot and leave maybe enough room for the bails to disengage. Tight is good , no!? I'm guessing most standard bail releases come from twisting force along two axes : rotating your foot (in the axis that would change your binding angles) while simultaneously pulling up on the heel and pushing down on the toe (or pushing on heel and pulling up on toeside)

Joel, good luck and best wishes to recover! I also have a rod in my front leg, although I'm sure my accident was far less serious, and the recovery for yours is probably longer than mine was (I was 17 years old), let me say that once you are over the hill and ready to start physio, recovery is very satisfying and visible process. Every time you go to the gym, you can see a difference. The first time I hobbled into the gym,I leg pressed 3 reps 20 lbs with my left leg and it was shaking and in pain. The next week I was doing 40 and it just rockets off from there, with pain dissipating. You gain muscle fast, and your bone mends and denses up so fast once you just get to the stage of hobbling around and being able to be healthy. I was surprised at how short a recovery it was to get to the point of 100%, strength comes back quick; agility takes longer and is a bit harder, but really, once you're hobbling, it's such a smooth progression to getting stronger and faster than you were before. I hope this helps and that soon you'll be with fellow physio guys who lost what they love doing, and are working to get it back with you On another note I'm really going to sticker up my board nice with binding decals and (Catek soft on prior mfr and if I can get to SES sometime, some bombers with plenty of stickers on donek FC). It's pretty awesome that we have these 2 great manufacturers who give this much to the sport, and build such solid bindings which keep us solidly and safely on our boards and take so much force directing our power to the boards.

thanks, got to decide soon and both places look extremely enticing, I can't wait! I was thinking that if that little range got above 200 inches a year, I could snag powder IN BETWEEN CLASSES all on foot! The university buildings are the ones backed right up to the mountain.

okay, next year is a "study abroad" year for University, which is pretty sweet since I can go anywhere and still pay McGill admissions :) I can't decide between Anchorage and Missoula, and whichever one I choose I'll probably end up staying I have a question about Missoula: It seems that literally the backyard of Missoula is Mt. Sentinel and a few more mountains... it looks to be about 2000 vertical feet up to 5200 ft? Does it get enough snow to hike up and snowboard into town, and does it have enough terrain to make this awesome? From pictures it looks like there's plenty of nice lines, and you have the option of a wide open treeless, constant fall line, or a hairy fall line full of trees! Is it really easy to drive to the big resorts? Also, is that new resort in the Bitteroot mountains going to happen? Thanks.

i've got a fever today so I'm just sitting here reading this and I'm really surprised! I knew there were cultural differences in the States, and pretty much the only State I spend much time in is Vermont, so I guess I really didn't know the extent of it? I've heard that it's common for kids to "pack gats" even in places like Aspen let alone the big cities!?!? Even younger people have them? Is it common for unlicensed people to "pack heat"? When you say "carry" does that actually mean carrying it around concealed on the street, or do you mean packed away, ready to go in your house for burglars? hell i don't even leave my doors locked when i go out. sometimes the porch door is WIDE open and clearly visible and all cars are gone but nothing happens. All guns should be melted down and made into bicycles, then people would have to fight with their fists and legs, the real way!

Just came back from 2 months of mountain biking/canoe tripping in the northern Laurentians, and winter is soon! I ordered some freeride pro's and I'm wondering about the soft boots with the greatest fit to the bindings. I'm guessing Nidecker's boots because of the highback and straps, but what about others like Malamutes or DriverX's? Thanks guys!

What the ##### is a Husqvarna for !? A street dirt bike?!?! I don't know all that much about motorcycles, but I know enough to know I'm a huge fan of the Ducati Monster. I'd only ride one if I lived somewhere like California though, which will not happen!