the Adventure Lifestyle magazine

Uke skinning your cat or leaving your lover, there are a ways to ride your board. There are also many types of to ride: freeride, freestyle, park, big mountain, racing, carv- majority of riding is freeriding, mostly staying on trail but also the FL Projects, are now the benchmark of typical weight in other Burton boards like the sneaking into the park or getting lucky and finding powder. ing, jibbing, halfpipe riding, powder--you name it. The even 25% lighter than last year's. "Light weight has become the expected weight: says Burton's vice president of marketing, Dave Schriber. Indeed, Burton's lightest boards of previous years, Supermodels and the Customs, the high-end of Burton's freeriding boards. Sims has four mod- But what's up? How come at first glance all snowboards look the same? els of the Hex Project, a freeriding board that includes an aluminum honeycomb nose and tail They all have noses, tails, places to put your bindings, fancy graphics on the top and slick component to reduce weight. polyethylene on the bottom. And shapes? Let's face it, it's been a long time since anyone Aside from the continued trend of focusing on exotic materials to reduce weight, in the snowboard industry used the word "radical" to describe the a new snowboard demographics are playing a big role in the types of new freeriding snowboards now available. shape. Snowboard manufacturers have seemingly been focused on how to build a bet- In a sport that has historically been dominated by 19-year-old males, produd has typically been ter binding Isee sidebarl or how to send more pros on more heli trips to places more dif- made for, you guessed it, 19-year-old males. Now it's like the TItanic: women and children first. ficult to get to. Women's boards are everywhere. Expect them to be softer flexing, narrower and But as winter approaches and your fancy turns to the mountains, rest shorter boards. They more closely match the strength and performance needs of women, assured that you won't be disappointed with the new 1999 snowboards. All is not dead Boards like MLY's Tempest 152.5 or Sim's Star series by TIna Basich are just some examples of with snowboard design. Because the snow melts every summer, snowboard designers the many boards nicely suited for female riders. In terms of kids, boards have been too stiff and have nothing to do but go back to the drawing board every baseball season and dis- too wide for too long. The kids, it seems, are sick of it. Morrow's Future Pros or Burtan's cover, refine, develop and produce snowboards that can at least be called "new" or Choppers are created in this vein. "improved" leven if they can't be called radicall. This article is a little bit about what they So we've got lighter freeriding boards, women's freeriding boards, and kid's did on their summer vacation and what types of new-ond-improved-ness we can expect freeriding boards. What about the actual nature of freeriding itself? Freeriding used to be this winter on snowboard shelves. a mellow eddy in the stream of crazy, tricky freestylers or speed-needing carvers. Now it's The trends for the 1998/1999 snowboard seoson are driven by some mon- fast. And big. And getting faster and bigger. The world's best are demanding mare con­ ufacturing advances and some demographics. They are also based on the fact that trol, more stability and more turning response as they translate the one-hit tricks they everybody is relatively new to this sport and everybody's skills are still progressing at a learn in the park to the more fluid and continuous freeriding style. Directional shapes (a fast clip. more pronounced nase than taili continue to occupy the leading edge of snowboarding, Even if evolution of snowboard shapes is moving at glacial speed, it's impor- while twin-tips are moving closer to only being referred to in the past tense. Industry­ tant to remember that it's what's on the inside that counts. Snowboard construction tech- wide, boards are getting stiffer with slightly deeper sidecuts to allow for more stable land­ niques are involving more and more sophisticated processes and materials resulting in ings and quicker responses. boards that, even if they have the same or similar shape as previous years, are built sig- nificantly differently. The area that this has been most noticeable in is the weight boards. Believe the guy in the store when he tells you that this year's board is 10, 15 _ •• "'�'_� 7 leading freeriding styles. The new snowboards will actually be, well, new. Don't call them radical, but do count on changes in freeriding snowboards year. They've progressed in shape and performance to match the progression in enteႀ䊉 the market this year with step-ins and suddenly we have a revolution. Combine these new design efforts with the years of accumulated savoir faire of early entrants like Switch and K2, throw in some ski binding experience and bingo: you've got step-in bindings giving you performance and con­ venience. Now. Today. Some step-Ins come with supportive plastic high­ backႀ Dke Burton's 51 binding, Ride's Device and Rossignal's SIS. Otheႀ䊉, like Switch's family of aluminum and steel bind­ ings, Morrow's new Engage 3 system and K2's Clicker are lower profile and rely on the boot, not an external highback, for heeIsIႀ䊉 support. All require specialized boots to function, SO you need to checႀ out not only the binding, but also the boots to figure It all out. But the day has come for step-ins to be legitimate for both the convenience seeker and the per­ formance connoisseur. 70

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