Carve234

Just got back from a night at Paoli. Been pretty busy for the past couple weeks, but finally made time to get out and ride again. It was definitely more icy than I was expecting, but I think the snow was the fastest I've seen there yet this year. Apparently, there was another hardbooter out there tearing it up on the race course today (lonbordin, I'm looking in your direction...) because literally half the people I talked to mentioned another guy on a board like mine. Guess whoever it was was really catching people's attention...

Just got back. It was very wet and slushy, but I guess that was to be expected after 50 deg temps during the day... In all honesty, though, the conditions weren't that bad. The snow was pretty soft (since it was melting), so the edge hold was pretty good. My only issue was that it was really slow. Tough to get enough speed to lay down too many linked carves. It did get slightly faster after the sun went down and it started to solidify a bit. May want to throw a bit of wax on before you go tomorrow.

Heading back up to the peaks tonight. Hopefully, they've attacked some of the blower mounds with the groomers and they haven't completely covered mindbender with a park. Not holding my breath for either of those to happen though...

Yeah, I only made it until about 7:15 before calling it a night. I'd been there since about 2:30, so my legs were pretty well smoked by that point. The mounds from the snowmachines really made life interesting... I had found an amusing line through the top half of mind bender - had a pretty good time carving up and down the sides of a couple of the big mounds. It was much more difficult to lay out some big carves, but I still had a pretty decent time. I may try to make it back up on Fri or Sat. Will have to see how things go. I finally start training on Monday, so the whole productivity thing is really going to cut into my ability to spend random afternoons snowboarding. Not too pleased about that...

PM sent.

Granted, this happened at Paoli Peaks in Indiana, but still... An instructor came up to me at the top of the hill and hit me with this - "Man, that thing is awesome! I've been watching you ride that for like the past TWO WEEKS!" (This happened today, 15 Dec 2009. Paoli opened on 12 Dec 2009. That's FOUR DAYS, not TWO WEEKS.) He then immediately followed up with - "So my buddy tells me that that thing is actually a snowboard. Is it?" Simply amazing...

Looks like Paoli has claimed some more equipment... Went up there to ride for the afternoon today. It was almost completely empty, and conditions weren't bad, all things considered. Definitely alot more brown than there was on Sat, but the hills were mostly hard frozen cord that dissolved to frozen granular in the more trafficked areas. Got in a solid 4 hours of tearing up the open run under the lift before I realized that the frozen cord had torn open the palm of my left glove. I figure it's nothing a little duct tape wont fix, so I decide to try to track some down before it gets worse. I get to the top of the hill and reach down to unbuckle my front foot and realize that the toe of my left boot has a gaping crack running from where the tongue attaches down the inside of the boot, almost to where the toe pad attaches. Needless to say, this ended my day on the hill... Is this a common problem with snowboard boots? I want to say that I had heard of shells cracking on some of the old boots that used the transparent shells, but do newer boots do this? I guess mine aren't (or weren't, since they've moved on to a better place now) exactly new, but I wouldn't really call them old either. They're a set of Blax Franz boots that have probably 3 seasons of use - I bought them new in '04 or '05, but I know that they were made a bit before that. I guess that the main reason I ask is because I'm now in the market for a new pair of boots, and since it seems like boot prices have skyrocketed since I last bought them, I will probably look more closely at the classifieds. At least it was just the equipment that broke, and not me... Jim

Yes, I did in fact get to witness the epic demise of lonbordin's tanker... In fairness to his son, it actually did look like he tried to pull some kind of crazy front flip. Although most people try to do that stuff while they're still in the air, instead of waiting until they hit the ground again, haha. And at this point, I'd only give you partial spaz. You've got to really earn complete spaz... At the end of the day, it sucks that you broke your board, but at least you didn't break yourself. THAT would have been a really unfortunate start to the season... On a semi-related note, later that evening I saw another hardbooter, but never managed to catch up to him. Good to know there are others out there, even in Indiana. There was also alot of interest from the softbooters. There was a normal amount of the, "WOW!! I've never seen anything like that! What is it?!?!" kind of interest, but quite a few people wanted to know where they could get one. Of course, I directed them here - hopefully, we can bring a few more softbooters over to the dark side...

I'm going to try to get up there tomorrow, but I will probably have to leave by 8 or so if I go. I usually spend most of my time on lazy mile and paradise. Hopefully I'll see you up there. Jim

I usually head to Blue Mt. on Thursday nights from about 5 or so to 9:30-10. $17 will get you in if you have a college ID. Plus it usually empties out at about 8. Let me know if anyone wants to try to link up... Its always good to trade tips with another carver. Jim

I could probably do $120 plus shipping or some part of shipping. My concern with splitting shipping comes from having to ship to Canada. I have no problem with shipping to Canada, but I don't know what if any extra costs are involved with doing so (customs, etc.). If you let me know your zip code, I can try to get a quote and we can go from there. And I apologize up front if I don't reply right away, I'm currently getting destroyed by final projects and exams. Gotta love college...

Interesting innovation that some guys at my school are working on - a kind of HUD built in to a pair of ski goggles/helmet combination. Their end goal is to have a display that can be easily seen without interfering with vision or making your eyes refocus to look at it. Right now they plan to be able to show stuff like speed, direction, temperature, time, and altitude. When I last talked to them, they were planning on having a working prototype ready to go by the end of next week. Keep your eyes open for it in the next couple years, because rumor has it there was some interest by a couple of big goggle manufacturers....

Check out the pair of SB413's I've got listed in another thread. They're great boots in essentially brand new condition for close to what you're looking to spend. They would probably work fairly well for you since they tend to have a slightly softer flex for a hard boot, and a softer flex will probably help you learn to ride quicker. Let me know if you're interested and maybe we can work something out.

Not sure exactly because the boots are in OH and I'm in PA, so I can't easily get measurements and such to get a quote. Made some guesses at dimensions and weight and came up with about $25, which seems kinda high to me. That being said, I've never shipped boots before, so it could be reasonable. Since I don't know for sure and I'm not looking to screw anyone on shipping, I would gladly take $145 shipped.

Still available...