Dupraz: Big boards perform better

17 Dec 07

The above picture was taken in Austria. It is far better than the sun-less dull shot I took today. It served me well today, so I thought I would comment on it.

Still wanting to give the enormous amount of new snow in the Tsugaike backcountry time to settle in, with yesterday's strong winds in mind I headed up the Goryu lift system in search of wind loaded areas for some pit digging. Because Goryu resort is a very strange place, they didn’t have their top lifts open. That meant I couldn’t get as high as I wanted nor onto the aspect that might have produced interesting results. This left me to kill the morning with 6 consecutive loops on the gondola, each giving 700m vert of almost non-stop 50% tracked powder. It’s the first time in a while that I have used ski lifts like that, minus a heavy backpack.

I rode a total of 4200m vertical very (very!) quickly and enjoyed a good muscle burn from top to bottom non stop riding. All the easy to reach powder was along the edge of the piste and where it became a bit tracked I just jumped back onto the run, built up speed and over the edge into the trees again. This reminded me just how good powder-to-piste riding my Dupraz snowboard is. For days when I am not splitboarding, I couldn’t imagine a better board to ride. It has so much flow and momentum in the powder and then on hardpack it carves like a ski (almost). It never bogs on landings, it never bogs in trees. I just keeps on going, fast carving on flats and weaving through trees. Mine is 167cm, and I am a light weight. Watching people ‘ride’ short boards was amusing: bindings back in a desperate search for floatation which gives some faux-flotation but at the terrible cost of having no centred control of your boards planing surface and edges, no momentum, no ability to accelerate as you desire, no surfing, no power. In short, no performance. Besides wanting to spin around like a skateboard, I have no idea why people ride such short boards, particularly if you want to take that board into all mountain backcountry terrain.