Snowboarding is not a cheap hobby, especially for an aspiring degenerate living in the flatlands of Illinois. For that and a myriad of other equally limp excuses I managed a 15 year hiatus between our daily hill bombings after school at 4 Lakes in Lisle and when my wife finally inspired me enough to get back into boarding in 2005. A lot changes happen in a guy’s body between the ages of 16 and 31 – especially in the areas above the balls and below the neck – but what didn’t change in that time was the resounding pitch my neurons hit as I shuttle down a mountainside with a piece of plied fiberglass bound around my hooves.

Getting back into riding at an age just on the ripe side of young I wanted a board that was competant without getting ahead of me, reasonably priced, but well built and had some grounding in my roots as a rider having learned what passed as my skill on an 1988 Burton Air. After some research and demos I picked up a 2005 Burton Triumph.

Burton’s answer to an all mountain board fit the bill, but also came with some of the drawbacks lower priced Burton’s are known for: it was a bit stiff, a little too heavy, and didn’t have a whole lot of pop to it. This was fine for the first season or two as I was getting my sea legs back, but by last year my skills had progressed well beyond where I left them in the early ’90s and I was longing for a board that had better action and response, something that felt like an extension of me and not simply an addition.

After some research I settled on the 2009 Ride Prophet 164. I wasn’t doing any park riding and prefer mostly nice long runs hitting walls and kickers so I wanted something a little bit longer than the 160 I was riding on the Burton. I also wanted something that was going to edge a bit better as I was getting more comfortable at higher speeds. The Prophet and most of Ride’s boards are known for their great edging due to the high angle steeps on the edge as well as the material used – the same as is used in skateboard wheels – that help dampen vibrations on rougher, tighter snow. This has proved pretty beneficial in this year’s pretty underwhelming snow accumulation. What further put the Ride Prophet as my top contender was that it’s lines were a bit more severe than the very conservative Burton Triumph with a more spooned out nose and thinner mid-body, this combination would help it perform better in powder as well as packed stuff on groomers.

I picked the deck up for dirt cheap from The House Board Shop last spring when they had a 50% off sale. At $250 there was literally no better board that could come even close to suiting my specific needs for the mountain and then when you add in the wicked, magic dork graphics that bespeckled the board with wizardy sigils and all-seeing eyes laid in a gorgeous multi-layer transparency with a minimal color scheme, you had a snowboard cocktail that wooed all my little buttons into a seriously focused spending frenzy.

So she looked pretty and was hyped appropriately, but how did she ride?

Pretty good, I must say. I’ve tried her on the crummy packed shit at Devil’s Head, the crummy packed shit at the Canyons, the fluffier shit at the Canyons, some pretty decent stuff in Reno, Tahoe and also at Solitude and in every condition the response has been fantastic; the action is super live, the edging has been like a race car, and the weight distributes very well across the board making the board seem almost invisible or at least not in need of any conscious negotiating.

The one downside I’ve come up against so far is that it doesn’t seem to take a beating quite as well as the admittedly more brutish Burton Triumph. I’ve had my Prophet out for about 8 outtings this season and I’ve already pierced through every layer of my base and have begun chipping down through multiple layers on the top of my board. I do have a tendancey to go harder on my stuff than most, though I still can’t figure out how the hell I tore up the bottom the way I did as I haven’t been doing too much crazy stuff on rocks that I can remember. But the damages aren only disconcerting in relation to the time spent on the board, they are nothing some epoxy and TLC won’t fix.

All in all the Ride Prophet 164 is head and shoulders above the also very competant though clumsier 2005 Burton Triumph. It was the perfect progression for me with more aggressive handling and more taught action, the Ride Prophet certainly stands up as one of the more enjoyable all mountain boards available.

I’ve been going out to Salt Lake City pretty consistently for the past 5 years, at least once a season, to indulge in what could arguably be the best snow in the world. Over that time I’ve learned a couple things that are worth sharing.

1. It’s cheap to fly there.  Real cheap.  Typically it’s about $200 round trip from Chicago to SLC depending on who you fly with.  Add in taxes and the cost of shipping your board both ways and it will realistically cost you around $250.  Compare that to $450 to Reno or $600 to Aspen or Vail and there’s just no question.  Check expedia.com and try not to travel on heavy days like Fridays and Mondays and you should find some great deals.
2. They have the largest variety of resorts within less than 1 hour of the airport.  Sure Reno has Mt. Rose and Aspen has the Highlands, Snowmass and Buttermilk, but SLC has an incredible variety of resorts like The Canyons, Park City, Brighton, Solitude, Alta, Snowbird and more all within 30-45 minutes of the airport.
3. Buy discount tickets.  Utah Ski & Golf has a great selection of discounted tickets for sale right downtown SLC.  You can ride most resorts all day, any day for just over $50.  In some cases that can save you up to $40 in a single day.
4. The Park City area is nice because it has plenty of infrastructure to house and distract you while not on the mountain, but Park City gets the least amount of snow of all the resorts.  Check SkiUtah.com for an honest daily listing of snow reports.  Just this past Sunday the Canyons got 1″ of new snow, whileThe Wasatch Mountains get crazy dumped on consistently that last week of March every year.  Last year I was out there for 7 days and they got at least 1 foot of snow 5 of those 7 days and that storm kept up the week after I left.  Now, granted, this is an el nino year and snow has been pretty scarce everywhere, but if I were a gambling man I would still put all in that the last week of March is the perfect time to hit your favorite resort or two in the Wasatch Mountains.
5. For the past few years the Canyons has been running a great deal during that last week of March and first week of April.  $200 gets you lodging, 2 lift tickets and 2 breakfasts every day.  So far I have not seen them advertising this deal for this year though, the closest being the Ski Free & Breakfast, but you only get that deal if you rent one of their suites that start at $350.  Not as good of a deal.  I’m going to keep my eyes open and I’ll shout if I see that deal come up.  It’s kind of a bummer because then you’re stuck riding the Canyons the whole time you are there, but the price and convenience is just real hard to beat.  Plus, if you’re staying at the base of the mountain, no storm, even the one as epic as last season’s that shut down 80 up to Kimball Junction, can keep you off the mountain.

Liquid Image had ski goggles with an embedded video camera on display at the 2010 International Consumer Electronics Show in January. It’s run on an SD card that can hold around 2 hours of video or 16gb of data.

They’re pricing out at $150 which makes me a bit suspicious of the quality of the goggles, but what’s really exciting is not the goggles specific but the fact that this technology is about to be ubiquitous in the next few years.

There’s also a model available for scuba masks as well.

Be back soon… maybe.

I knew when we saw the married couple of hasidic midgets at the airport that magic was in the air, real and ancient magic, the kind of magic that builds nations, changes lives and alters the course of human history. Those little buggers in their devotional doll clothes had clearly been sent by central casting as harbingers of The Great Plenty, though there was little indication as to what form the Plenty wold come. But, after locking paths with those likable little jewish folk, it was clear that grand mysteries were destined to be revealed.

Naturally, since we were about to leave on a snowboarding trip I had assumed that magic would come in the form of fluffy white pillows of dry western snow, sheared rock faces and fresh mountain air. And it did in spades. But, on this fateful trip into that picturesque crease that splits down the center of the lushly decadent acreage of the fiercely individuated Nevada and the ceremoniously broke and broken California, there would be more.

Our plan was to fly into Reno, grab a half day at Mt. Rose then head into Tahoe for a couple days on Heavenly. But as we talked to people at Mt. Rose it become very apparent that, forced to choose, we’d be fools to skip Kirkwood.

30 minutes from the Reno airport, Mt. Rose offers something rare, the ability to leave Chicago in the morning and still have a half day’s worth of riding waiting for you upon landing. Mt. Rose is home to an impressive collection of pretty dramatic chutes and decent off trail runs that were challenging, though a bit rockier than they betrayed on first glance.

On the east side of Mt. Rose there’s the Winter’s Creek Lodge, as fine as any place you might find at a resort to stick your face into beer and it has an all glass wall providing one of the more staggering views of the Sierras we would get all weekend.

After a few good hours of riding and some carbonated medication we set off for our accommodations.

We picked up what seemed like a deal for our room on Craig’s List; $250 for 3 nights at the Diamond Resort, a time share community that was part day care center and part nursing home. It wasn’t a terrible price at $40 a night per person, but it was advertised as having a kitchenette. Unfortunately, the kitchenette consisted of a sink, a small fridge and a microwave, definitely not equipped for actually making food of any consumable sort and rendering that $40 a night price tag a bit more expensive by forcing us to eat out. Another bummer was that the pool and hot tub weren’t outside, a strange decision in a mountain town. Oh, and the foyer between our room and our neighbors smelled like an old person urine, that fine senior solution of one part stale, salty, manwater to two parts medicine. Ah, yes, and the maid service never so much as peaked in our door. But so what, I didn’t take this trip for the accomodations, though it is worth noting that when we return we won’t be staying at the Diamond Resort in South Lake Tahoe.

But where the Diamond Resort with it’s geriatric situations failed us Heidi came to our rescue. And our rescue, in all it’s Nordic splendor, came stacked three high and smothered in butter and warm maple syrup. That’s right, I’m speaking of bacon filled pancakes, specifically Heidi’s Pancake Houses Bacon Stack. The Bacon Stack is a delicious, classic repeller cake filled with chunks of bacon cooked right inside of Heidi’s delicious batter. Heidi’s also offers a bacon waffle which, in retrospect, I think might be even better than the bacon pancakes, the light crunchiness of the waffle I’m guessing will provide an even more appropriate throne upon which that sweet salty hog can hide before running flavor ambushes on your jaded palette. Every dish at Heidi’s is served lovingly large with a clementine on the side and our waitress, Jane, was about as sweet and attentive as you’d want your waitress to be without being creepy or phony or following us home.

Our first full day of riding at Kirkwood killed. Natural bowls, rolling tubes, soft snow and a warm afternoon sun. It delivered on every level you would want and then some. I was loving this one run that we did several times picking it up off of Solitude, scooting behind a terrain park and then ducking into some tree lines. It was a long tube filled with rollers and little grade changes and drops. It hadn’t been touched much and nobody was around when we were riding it.

Later, we dug around on Deadwood Spur for a while picking out some nice lines inside the trees. Trevor ultimately grew several extra pairs of balls and took the t-line up to the top of Larry’s Lip. I’m just a nice midwestern boy whose synapses aren’t quite as damaged as his so I kept chipping away on Deadwood Spur while he did that.

After 4 good hours of riding we bellied up at the Tower to indulge in some of Lake Tahoe Breweries fine devices. The beer was effective enough, perhaps too much so, as before long I found myself on “The Wall” climbing to just over 9,400′ and what I was assuming with increasing certainty would be my complete undoing.

Whinnying like a small, gelded, lamb the only solace I could find was in the continued promises to punch Trevor in the nuts repeatedly as soon as I could find some level ground on which to properly levy my strength. But before too long he was talking me through it and managed to get my brain to more adequately process the information needed to get myself down the mountain.

Once I decided I was actually going to ride the bloody mountain and not slide down as slowly and perpindicular as possible, it was an incredible release. I stopped staring as far below me as my eyes could theorize terrible events and started focusing in the 20′ in front of me that I could actually react and respond to and hope to manage and maintain a desirable fate. I kept my knees bent and soft and popped my hips around as I essentially jumped down the mountain from point to point. I stayed loose, remained focused and fell into a rhythm the eliminated everything in the world from existence but my brain and the contours of this holy mountain.

I got to the bottom, my lungs dialated, my pupils air tight and my whole body running at a resonant hum. I couldn’t get back up the mountain soon enough.

We did a few more runs, hit the Tower for some more libations and cheesy fries, before ultimately loading up our coffees and heading back down the pass to South Lake Tahoe. We still had a day of riding left, but it was clear my peak had passed.

That night we hit the Lakeside Casino for an $8.50 Prime Rib dinner, got a peanut butter smothered ice cream at the Red Hut and passed out watching the X-Games.

Sunday was a gorgeous bluebird day, but my legs were shot to hell. Early on Trevor hiked up to the highest point on the resort at Thimble Peak and rode down the mountain to random spikes of hoots and hollering.

We split the rest of the day between the taps and the trails lighting out of Kirkwood before the musical illiteracy of the spongey-headed native Californians could truly negatively and permanently effect us.

Seriously, I heard a dub remix of Pink Floyd’s “The Lunatic Is In the Grass” not once, but twice in the same day. I’d rather be raped by a board room full of advertising geeks dressed in paisley priest outfits and farting axe body spray from their bleeding pores than have to sit through another downbeat of that tasteless morass of sonic psuedo-goovism ever again.

I don’t know, maybe I had had too much of that cookie from that kind native and it was making me edgy and cranky, but for the love of all that has self-respect and a functional state economy I needed to get home STAT, take myself a music bath and wash this third rate schwag rock hippie horse shit off me for once and for good, “bro”.

We retreated to the nursing home and slowly, cathartically, and with a kind of religious attention to detail cleaned ourselves and shuffled out the door for the casino. It had been an amazing run, Tahoe had been quite good to us and the midgets had pulled their tiny little magical weight. We bellied up for some Black Jack that paid for our dinner and drinks and brought a slow, grounded, mahogauny sensibleness to our weekend’s pursuits.

Sitting at the Harrah’s about to get dealt my 6th of 9 Black Jacks I would win for the evening when the pit boss summed it up better than I ever could, he said:

“This is fucking Nevada, sir, you can smoke in here if you like. Hell, we’ve got gambling, fishing, all kinds of skiing, prostitution, those amazing lakes out there and our bars are open 24 hours a day, every day, no matter what. Could you possibly need anything else?”

Yes, one other thing. Bacon filled pancakes…

Waxing your snowboard is a pretty enjoyable and brainless way to help stoke your excitement for your next trip.

Here’s what you need:

A Work Space
This gets a bit messy with shreds of wax turning your floor into a curling rink so make sure you’ve got a garage or basement or some place that can take some mess and clean up easy. I use my garage along with 2 saw horses. There’s a radio out there, plenty of light, all the tools I need and it sweeps out into the alley quick and easy.

An Iron
Pick one up used at a thrift store for a buck or two or buy one at Target for $15. Don’t waste your money on anything fancy (like this overpriced idiocy)
and don’t expect to use this to press your church clothes when you’re through.

Goo-Gone
You know the stuff, you can get it at just about any grocery store or pharmacy.

Wax
We used Cera Nova CH Wax 60g by Swix, it’s the medium grade or mid-temperature grade as we couldn’t get a good answer on what the temperature refers to, the ambient air temperature or the temperature of the snow. If somebody knows and could give a decent reason as to why the ambient air temperature would actually effect how your snowboard glides I’d love to hear it.

Paste
We used Dakine Snowboard Paste.

Scraper
I’ve used a CD case in the past and a ruler, any kind of hard straight edge that’s not terribly sharp should be fine.

Steel Wool
The cheaper the better.

Beer
I like a nice cold sessionable beer, most recently that’s been Half Acre’s Daisy Cutter.

Here’s what you do:

In good light, put your board on a long workbench or a couple saw horses. I find the saw horses work well as the bindings, nose and tail drop below your work level and don’t interfere. Scrub off any old wax with your Goo-Gone, just wet a rag with it and scrub.

Once your board is nice a clean take a chunk of your wax and rub it on the hot part of the iron until it starts to drip, then move your wax and iron across your board so you can get full coverage. An alternative way to do this is to cover your board with the wax like it’s a big crayon. This can help get you a more even coverage at the outset and may save you some time later.

Once you’ve got a decent coverage of wax go ahead and use the iron to spread it evenly all over the bottom of your board. Make sure every inch of your board that will be in the snow is covered evenly.

Take your scraper and, at about a 60* angle to your board start scraping off the wax in long strokes. Move from the front of your board to the back. Continue this until nothing but the bottommost layer of wax remains and all inconsistancies are smoothed out. You should be able to run your hand over your board and have it feel smooth.

Take your steel wool and buff it out good.

Finally, rub on your paste in circular movements. Wipe down real good with a soft towel.

There you go, just like that and you’re ready to enjoy a gorgeous mountain!

Damn, this kid is as good as he is ginger ugly.

Well, almost as good.

Holy crappers I can’t wait to get back on a mountain!!! It looks like Heavenly will be my first victim for this season. Can I go now??????

Don’t lose hope dear internetting ones, we still have every intention of launching the full Outsider’s Almanac website in the near future, it just won’t be quite as soon as we had hoped. We’re pretty insanely busy these days, between writing projects, client needs, body/mind/spirit rehabbing and the pursuit of winter in it’s many splendered and distracting forms, but you should expect to see the site live by around April 1st, 2010.

We’ve got our sites on making Outsider’s Almanac the most exhaustive and user friendly site for all Outsider activities by combining tutorials with expert articles, videos, web based and mobile communication apps, up-to-the-minute live and critical information on sites and conditions, gear reviews, site reviews, events, and so much more.

Like you, we love the Outside, it’s beautiful out here, and boy is it easy to get distracted. We wouldn’t want it any other way.