NateW

My thoughts exactly. :) Early in my relationship with my girlfriend, I got back from snowboarding and: her: Did you have a good time? me: yeah, it was really nice up there. her: Did you fall? me: Uhmmm.... I fall every other run at least. Usually it's trivial stuff like leaning too hard into a turn and just tipping over and sliding a bit, or missing a turn in some moguls and falling on my butt. But I don't think that counts. Half the time I'm able to get my board under me and get back on my feet without coming to a complete stop (and if not, I just wasn't going fast enough to begin with :) ). Once or twice a day I fall kinda-hard and it takes a few seconds to get back onto my feet. But I'm completely over it after a few minutes. (Last Monday, I had two of those.) I think those count as falls. I have days without those, but they're rare. About once a season I fall hard-hard and I'm in pain for a couple days, maybe a week. I bought a cane after one of those, a few years ago, at about age 30. My goal is not to need it again until I'm retired. But last year I bought a nicer one just in case.

:lol:

Clif bars and Balance bars. Been thinking about taking bags of nuts (almonds, shelled peanuts) but haven't yet. I'll be reading this thread with interest. :)

Delicious.

Him: Ever tried a real snowboard? Me: I was just about to ask you the same thing! (I'm still really proud of that one.)

I'm pretty sure Aggression's failures were caused by glue that just didn't bond well. Before I blew up my Aggression metal capped board, I blew up two of their non-metal, non-capped boards. IIRC, I got 7 or 8 consecutive days out of 3 boards. (They sent me a fourth and I gave it away. Got tired of hearing, "wow, I've never heard of that happening before.") That said, I do believe that sidewall construction is preferable. The problem with the folded-paper analogy is that the topsheet is not what gives a board its strength.

I feel victim to this earlier today, just from trying to crank a toeside that was faster/tighter than the snow would support. If you look at your tracks from the lift, are your toesides generally tighter than your heelsides? If so, that alone might help explain why this happens more often on your toes than on your heels.

Yes, in fact I was in a pair all day today. I've had them for 3 seasons now I think (alternating with a few other different pair). I really like them, and I'm glad to see that they're still available. The cuffs they fit over my sleeves (wrist guards and all) and the drawstring holds tight. I used to covet those $100+ gloves too. :) The palms are not especially tough but they're not bad either. I think what ruins my gloves in grabbing the tail of my board - I've put little cuts in the palms of most of my gloves and these were no exception. I used shoe-goo to put kevlar patches on the palms of most of my gloves, including these. I am tempted to get some of the Raider gloves mentioned earlier, but these gloves (from Cabelas) have me hooked on goretex now. For those of you with Raiders, do they stay dry?

Got a rock board? Now would be a good time to wax it. :)

Today.... Him: Whoah, what is that? Me: It's a carving setup. Him: What's it for?

I'd use them, but I'd put a sheet of (roughly) 15cm x 15cm UHMW, about 1/2" thick, in between the discs and the topsheet. And some appropriately long mounting bolts of course. Ghetto riser plates with better force distribution. If there is a shop like this in your area.... http://www.tapplastics.com/ ...then $15 should get you a couple of pieces cut to spec while you wait. You'll probably have to drill holes for the binding mounting bolts, but they might even do that too. If not, plain old drill bits work fine, they just produce confetti instead of sawdust. When I did this I swiss-cheesed the plate using 1" and 1/2" bits, trying to save weight, but I was surprised how little weight all those holes actually saved. For extra style points, see if they will cut discs for you rather than squares. I did this years ago, to mount 4x4 bindings on a pre-4x4 board, and it worked well. I will probably do it again when my current rock board bites the dust, and its TS1-SIs need a new home. It had bumpers on it now, but I think making risers would be less trouble than fidding with the bumpers with every stance change.

Looks to me like your upper body is twisted wrong in the first picture - try to aim your chest more in the direction of the nose of the board, rather than facing the snow. Keeping your trailing hand forward should help with that. Also try leaning more on your front foot throughout the turn. And then try leaning more on your back foot. :) See which helps more. And double-check that you're not booting out, just to be sure.

Bigger sidecut is more fun when there's room to use it, and less fun when there isn't. If I can't get enough speed to really lean it into the turns (due to crowds or narrow runs or whatever), then it gets kind of boring. But in places where I can then it's more fun to make a few big fast turns rather than several smaller turns at lower speeds. FWIW, "big" for me is 15m, "small" is 10m, and 12-13 is a compromise that's fun anywhere around here. But I can totally see how 10m or less would be the most fun choice on a smaller or more crowded hill.

Those seem to me like pretty reasonable dimensions for a first carver. My feet are Mondo 27 and I have a 23cm-waisted board with 45/40 angles and it works fine (It was the board the got me started with proper alpine technique, and I still use it for early and late season riding). The sidecut is small enough to carve nicely at low speeds, but you'll probably want something with a bigger sidecut radius fairly soon unless your mountain is really crowded. But if the price is right, consider getting it, learning on it, and keeping it as a rock board. Next year, get something with a radius of 10m or more, and hang onto this one for the iffy days, so your other board doesn't get scratched up.

I might see C5 (Al) and/or Art once or twice a year (hi guys!) plus maybe one or two other random hardboot sightings. But 9 times out of 10, the only hard boots I see are the ones I'm wearing.

It looks like when you tilt the upper deck, the boards change angles (along the 'steering' axis) but their bases remain flat on the snow. So wouldn't that just leave you traveling straight ahead, standing on two base-flat boards that are at slight angles to your direction of travel? Are the bases flat like regular snowboards? And if you do tip it up on edge, wouldn't the two edges of those boards be at different angles to your direction of travel, and thus they'd be constantly fighting with each other? Or do they remain parallel to each other? The upper deck looks cool but it seems like it really needs blades underneath it, like snowmobile skis or (maybe better) ice skates.

I leaned forward for years. Then I moved my bindings forward a bit, and now I keep my weight centered and my front leg doesn't burn out as quickly. :)

For me the sweet spots are roughly: length 175 waist 19 sidecut 13 and a lifted/rounded tail I have gotten boards with near those parameters, but not quite exactly, as I've been zeroing in on my personal 'one' board. I think I will have one by the end of this season though, from a new builder in my area: http://www.happymonkeysnowboards.com/

I remember being excited when my local mountain decided to allow snowboards. The crowds have gotten worse, but snowboarding has only gotten better.

This is short on details, but it has a little bit of information about the case: http://www.sftc.org/Scripts/Magic94/mgrqispi94.dll?APPNAME=IJS&PRGNAME=ROA&ARGUMENTS=-ACGC05443225 Can't see the last two documents though, and they seem significant.

I assume that Ohno's strength and endurance are substantially better than most folks in the series (I'm sure they're no slouches, but neither were the people Ohno beat in the Olympics). I also assume that he's got fewer hours of experience with snowboarding than most folks in the series (but how do we know he hasn't been carving for years?). Seems to me that it comes down to a question of whether his (assumed) greater-than-average fitness outweighs his (assumed) lesser-than-average experience. I wouldn't be surprised either way, but I'm hoping he kicks some ass, because I think the extra publicity for hardbooting would be a good thing.

As someone who rides that park ~15 times a year, I have trouble with those claims. I'm not taking sides in the Salvini case, but the first part of your claim is not believable and the second part worries me because it might be true.

Interesting, the guy on TGR said BC was insured by AIG. Pardon the alphabet soup. :)

I had a set of Nitros that failed the same way. A couple sets actually, because I was either too cheap or too slow-learning to realized I could have saved money by buying Bombers instead.