It ain't backcountry, but it ain't wrong. Or, once a spider crawls up your leg, does a crawlspace count as backcountry?
So, you think I rest during summer? Fat chance of that!
Despite our little mountain town of Carbondale becoming the heat soaked Dubai of Colorado, I’ve been staying close to home and improving WildSnow HQ. Channeling my previous life as a builder and remodeler, the repairs have flown fast and furious — as have the Lowe’s receipts. What keeps me going crawling through 110 degree rock wool in a hundred year old attic? Ah, the thought of eventually doing more work at the WildSnow Field HQ cradled in the West Elk Mountains, up where the temperatures are cool and the alpine breeze hints of crystalline arcs soon to commence.
Let it snow!
As for our blog projects, never a dull moment in that area. Yesterday we got our loaner Iridium Extreme satphone, so we’re now fat with three satellite phones for comparo (Globalstar and two models of Iridium). Working on it.
Along with the space phones, I’m heavily into evaluating GPS/mapping smartphone apps for a variety of mind saturating projects that seem to have fallen in my lap like the defensible space trees I wish I was felling up at Field HQ. My Samsung Galaxy Note 2 is seeming to be a hot number; the larger screen just begs to be used for everything from watching vintage Three Stooges videos to GPS survey work on mysterious backcountry property parcels. Battery life is the issue, but, since the Note has a user swappable power cell, the aftermarket has kicked in with some blimp sized batteries that are said to run the phone for “days.” Several of the monster cells are on the UPS truck.
I’ve been asked a few times about our next “Ultimate Quiver” ski review. I’m well along with that; look for publication in a few weeks. Lighter weight skis will be our focus this year, though we’re not ignoring how the planks go down the hill. Along with that, yesterday J.R. lent us a Prior carbon splitboard to stick on the scale and compare to our ski weights. I don’t profess to be the go-to in terms of comparing snowboard weights, but this one seems to mass quite comfortably in the lower weight category.
Still life with Prior. XTC may cause that snowboarder to climb fast.
I’m not sure I got the surface area estimate calculated in a way that compares to skis, but here’s how it turned out: Movement Response-X is still our lightest in terms of weight vs surface area with a score of 63, with Trab Magico at 64 (virtually the same) and Dynafit Cho Oyu at 69. These are amazingly light skis that all go downhill quite nicely. Per “ski” the Prior splitboard fits in there with a WildSnow weight index of 67. Stick your snowboard bindings on there and the story might be a bit different, but still, watch out for that guy with the splitboard coming up behind you, he might just have less “ski” weight than you do.
Here are the actual weights of a few comparos, see this link for complete weight charts:
Pair of Movement Response-X 185 cm, 89 mm waist, 2,402 grams
Pair of Trab Magico, 171 cm, 81 mm waist, 2,000 grams
Pair of Dynafit Cho Oyu, 173 cm, 87 mm waist, 2,366 grams
Pair of G3 Zen C3 178 cm, 105 waist, 2,960 grams (in our view, this is our nearest comparison to the Prior)
Complete Prior XTC Splitboard, 165 cm, each ski has 128 mm waist, 3,054 grams
Splitters out there, what’s the comparison of a splitboard binding setup to an average Dynafit Radical or something like that?
WildSnow.com publisher emeritus and founder Lou (Louis Dawson) has a 50+ years career in climbing, backcountry skiing and ski mountaineering. He was the first person in history to ski down all 54 Colorado 14,000-foot peaks, has authored numerous books about about backcountry skiing, and has skied from the summit of Denali in Alaska, North America’s highest mountain.
