Grays On Trays

Wandering around a ski show sometimes presents you with the opportunity to see some new and different products. During one show, for example, I came across someone selling FastStrap carriers. They are, as the name suggests, straps (about the width of a very wide belt) that you can use to carry a snowboarad, surfboard, pair of skis, boots, and other sports-related equipment.

They have glorified snowboard leashes as well as straps for carrying your board behind your back.

Useful? Not? I don’t know. I normally don’t travel that far between my car and the hill to use the snowboard strap. Plus, my pockets are full enough as it is.

But some people may find such a strap useful.

You’d like to think that the mountain is a refuge from the ugly side of life. And often it is. But not always. “Theft happens,” as one sign at a local ski area says.

Indeed it does, which is why the management says “Don’t blame us if someone swipes your skis or board.”

I didn’t worry so much about theft when my board was a second or third-hand cast-off that had cost me about $100. But when I paid more than four times that for a new board, I thought it best to buy a lock.

To be sure, locks aren’t foolproof. I’ve seen many a bike lock, for example, attached to a bike rack–with the bike missing. The same thing can happen with a snowboard lock.

But as I learned earlier this season, locks are not foolproof. As the saying goes, fools are ingenious.

So here’s my story. Luckily, the only thing I lost out of the day was a lock, not my board.

I had made a stop at the chalet. As usual, I took my small cable-based lock out of my pocket and secured it to my board.

I was careful about running the cable through the right place. After all, the easiest route was simply to run the cable underneath the “Powerstrap” of my Flow bindings. But even I, a “handyfoot,” recognized that it would be trivially easy to defeat the lock: Unclip the side ratchets, open up the powerstrap, and remove the board.

So I thread the cable through the hard plastic that holds the heel in place. Even so, I feared that a thief could take a screwdriver and detach the heelcup from the binding, slide the cable lock away and then walk with my board.

Unfortunately, I had a chance to test that theory–but in the role of the would-be thief.

I came out from the chalet to remove the lock. As usual, I twirled the dials until the numbers of my 3-digit code came up. But this time something different happened: the lock would not open.

So I tried again. I moved the wheels forward, and then back, and then forward again, until I reached the code.

It still didn’t open.

Perhaps I did things in the wrong sequence. I tried again. Still no luck.

I tried again. One. Two. Three. Four. Five times. My luck was “out of luck.”

My fingers were getting cold, too, so I went inside the lodge to think things over, and came up with a diagnosis. The problem may have occurred when I set the lock in the first place.

To trigger the lock, you move the wheels so that the 3-digit code is replaced by some other number. I had done that–and then decided to reposition the board and the lock. That had meant opening up the lock and resetting it. Perhaps somehow in all that I had unknowingly reset the code.

Yeah, I thought. Maybe that’s what happened.

But if that was in fact what happened, I was really in trouble, since the lock had been reset to a random number.

Maybe it was time to break out dumb force.

So I went outside to try all 1,000 combinations. 000. 001. 002. 003. 004. 005.

I made it up to 700 before I gave up and called a friend who, I thought, might be out on the hill. He was. As it turns out, he was sitting on the deck on the other side of the chalet.

We talked about my problem. He went inside to talk with the kitchen staff. He thought one of the workers had a wire cutter handy. But that person wasn’t on duty.

So we tried to disassemble the binding by taking out a couple of screws. We used the two stubby screwdrivers that I carry, using them in opposition against each other.

We removed one of the screws before we saw another problem. The cable lock was not merely threaded around the hard plastic of the binding, it was also twisted around a cable built into the binding. That greatly complicated matters.

So my friend came up with a different idea: bust the lock. He did, by applying some force to the hasp of the lock with a knife. He then slid the cable out of the lock, and liberated my board from its sentence to the rack.

After about 45 minutes, my board was free! The lock was rendered useless, but $10 was a small price to pay.

Here’s the odd (and disturbing) thing about this incident: During the time I spent hovering around the board, trying to first crack the combination and then dismantle the binding and then the lock, nobody asked me why or what I was doing. What if I was the thief?

Then again, I’m not sure what I would have said had the ski patrol came around:

“Sir, I’ve noticed that you’ve been trying to break into that lock for 20 minutes. Can you explain yourself?”

“Well, ah, yes. I accidentally reset the combination on my lock and now I can’t open it.”

“Can you prove that this is your board?”

“Uhm. If you call __, they may have a record that I bought this model from them last year.”

So what’s the best way to avoid theft? The most sure way may be to check your gear with the on-mountain staff. But that option isn’t always available.

Locks can fail and most can be defeated by someone with the right tools.

There’s no perfect solution. The best alternative may simply be to have a lock–any sort of lock–to make your board a little more difficult to steal than the one next to it.

At the end of the last season, a friend of mine who teaches at Bear Valley, California, gave me this binding tool. Are things like this ubiquitous? I’ll have to admit that it’s the first time I’ve seen a binding tool/bottle opener/advertising piece.

My bindings come from Flow, which means that the on-snow tool isn’t useful. On the other hand, the bottle opener function could be handy for apres-ski activities.

Ask your typical snowboarder what he thinks about leashes, and he may say “They’re stupid. I don’t see why I should wear one.”

A leash can be useful for several reasons. The most common one is that it lets you drag the board behind you as you walk towards the lift. “Walking the dog,” as this is called, is a useful alternative to carrying your board.

But there’s reason why a leash can be useful: it can keep the board attached to you during the ride on the lift.

The particulars of the story I’m going to tell depend in part on the type of bindings I use–Flows have a releasable highback, as seen on this page–but if you change a few details, the story could apply to other riders.

When I descended the exit ramp, I locked my back finding into place. But I also discovered that I had not snapped the highback on my front foot into place before I got on the lift. During the lift up, the board was hanging in space, secured only by the fact that there was a single (though large) piece of very stiff fabric (I believe Flow calls it the “I-strap”) on top of my foot. The whole concept of Flows depends on being able to recline the highback for an easy entry to the bindings, and then pushing the highback back into place. Instead, I had something different–something roughly akin to wearing a backless sandal while hanging in the air.

I was horrified at what might have happened on the lift. The binding did fit pretty well over my boot, so it was unlikely to go anywhere. To shed the bindings–and hence the board–I would have had to point my toes toward the ground and shake my foot a few, or many times. I don’t normally do that, and I’m not sure that I even could. But consider what would have happened if that highly unlikely event would have happened: My board would drop 30 feet to the ground. At the least it would land with some force and slide a ways. At worse, it could land on someone.

That’s where the leash comes in. Had the board fell off my foot, the leash would have arrested the fall.

Maybe this is all belt-and-suspender stuff, or maybe two pair of suspenders. No matter. The cost of using a leash is trivial, and the benefits (potentially) substantial.

When I went to a local ski and snowboard shop to see what they had left on closeout, there wasn’t much. But I did make one purchase: a package of DryGuy Circulators.

They’re easy to use. Plug them into an AC outlet, stick one in each boot, and wait. They make no noise and get the job done.

How do I know? It’s my second pair. I bought this model to take on trips so that my companions can have a set, too. Storage is no problem, as they’re both small and light, but effective.

At least on boots. I’ve tried them on some gloves, but they don’t get the job done in the fingers. Your mileage may vary on mittens, however.

One of the Christmas presents I received recently was the Burton Flash drive. Shaped like a snowboard, it’s an interesting and fun item.

The version I have is a smaller model–a single gigabyte.

It has, for example, two Quicktime movies. Actually, “movie” is too grand a word for what are actually 30-second commercials. One features an unnamed rider getting big air off a jump. Another features an unnamed rider taking a line down big mountain terrain, and getting air off of natural terrain features.

A much longer clip–10 minutes–is titled “Burton Lesson 101.” It opens with some eye-candy shots of big mountain riding that will inspire newbies to say “I’d like to do that some day.” Jake Burton gets some brief face time before receding for the rest the film, though he remains the narrator.

The video is one part pitch for the company, one part enticement to riding, and one third educational product. It pitches the company’s various “learn to ride” programs at resorts.

The video also includes general tips for how to dress, how to select the right sized board, what safety equipment you might consider, and how to use strap bindings. (It also includes tips on how to use step-in bindings, which don’t get much play today.) Fro there you get taken to the very elementary basics of a lesson.

Another feature is less useful–a collection of still photos of riders sponsored by the company. There are also three catalogs of Burton products. Those provide some information, but you’d be better off going to a shop and getting a paper copy to browse.

All in all, I’d say this is a useful product.

The solution to ripped, wrinkled trailmaps may be a cloth.

While at Crested Butte a couple of weeks ago, I was given a localized version of The Spanky. Short for “Sports Hanky,” the spanky is a cloth that can be used as a fabric for cleaning off your goggles, and more importantly, for finding your way around the mountain.

A key element to the product, according to the company’s web site, is a “fabric that will not scratch today’s high tech len’s surface.” They claims that it’s safe for goggles and camera lenses as well.

Buried in the cloth is a trail map of Crested Butte. I always like having a trail map with me, but paper maps quickly become wrinkled, ripped, torn, and worse, rendered into several pieces through repeated acts of placing in and removing from coat pockets.

That can’t happen with the Spanky. Though mine get a bit wrinkled and in need of cleaning, it’s all in one piece, even after three days on the mountain and the trip home.

The Spanky doesn’t take the place of a paper map, however. Before heading out to a mountain for the first time, get a paper map and study it carefully. Take a look at the statistics, such as elevation and lift hours, that aren’t on The Spanky. Get familiar with the names of slopes that you’d like to visit. The names of black trails show up very well on my copy, but the names of green trails are harder to see, and some of the blue names are very difficult to read at all.

The company has over 40 resorts represented in its inventory, including 11 mountains in Colorado alone. You can get one for under $15–$8.95 plus shipping, handling, and tax as applicable.

If you’re going to a place for just a day or two, The Spanky is on the spendy side. But if you’re going to be somewhere 3 or more days, it may be more worthwhile.

I had a wonderful day riding in fresh powder. It was a great experience except for one unfortunate incident right after lunch.

After having a breakthrough morning, I went in for lunch. One thing that had made the morning so great was the constant availability of water through my new Dakine hydration backpack. If you’ve never had a constant source of water available to you out on the slopes, try taking in a lot of water next time out, and see what a difference it makes.

But you’ve also got be careful, and that’s something I wasn’t right after lunch. I threw the pack on, as well as my helmet, got into the lift line, and rode up the chair, anticipating a great ride down.

I got a ride, all right. But it wasn’t great.

As I went to descend from the chairlift, I felt a resistance. I couldn’t ride away from the chair. One of the straps from the backpack had gotten tangled up in the lift chair.

I was going for a different kind of ride.

I tried to yell, but I don’t think I got anything out. I was stunned. The chair swung around, ready to start heading down the hill again. But I was still attached, via the strap on my pack.

Fortunately the liftie stopped the whole contraption before I got very far. My feet never left the ground, meaning that I was never suspended in air. The happy result: no separated shoulder (or worse) from hanging, mid-air, from the lift via my pack.

The pack itself was ruined; it tore right along side the zipper. Better it than me. I found my way down to the ski patrol, where somebody gave me a few simple tests to determine there was no obvious nerve damage, and I went on to finish the day.

My only damage: a couple of small bruises on my arm. And no significant pain the next day.

A week later, I did buy another pack. But this one doesn’t have as many straps, and I’m very particular about wrapping any excess around and a round, so as to make sure there’s no repeat.

While “slippery” is a good quality for the underside of a snowboard, it’s not a good quality for the topside. The last thing you want to do when you put a foot on top of the board is to slip away. That’s what stomp pads are for.

Today I installed a stomp pad on my “new” (used) board. I am not sure yet where my bindings will end up, or even if I will want to change from a regular stance to a goofy one, so I didn’t want to put it too close to either set of binding holes.

That’s not the optimal choice. Ideally, I should put it next to where my bindings will end up being permanently. But since I don’t know where that is yet, it is better to minimize the downside that would come from having it in the wrong place. Better “middle of the road,” which is where the new pad is: in the middle of the board, right between the two sets of binding holes.

My first day ever out on snowboarding was on a rental board (as part of a class) that did not have a stomp pad. It wasn’t until my second lesson that I got a stomp pad, and understood its value.