Tag Archives: Snowboarding

Surveil me better

I’ve joined the travel site dopplr. It’s pretty simple. Put in trips, connect through them. Useful for the frequent flying types that I’m supposed to become soon. You can see the little badge over there on the left telling you that I’ll be in Mount Snow this weekend.

Except that it tells you West Rutland, because neither Mount Snow or West Dover are understood as places by Dopplr. I picked a town near Killington, but that seems a bit lame to me.

K2 CINCH is the best of both worlds

I dropped by princeton ski last night to check out the K2 cinch bindings. They are fantastic. I’m going to buy them as soon as the thanksgiving sales hit. Jebus they are sweet.

They generally look like a regular strap binding. The clicks on the straps look kind of crappy, but they are standard attachments so you could replace them. I like to ratchet down really tight, but these seem to pop too easily. No matter.

The great thing is that you can easily adjust your binding tightness while riding, just as with any straps.

But the killer application is when you want to get quickly in and out. There’s a power cord at the back just like flow bindings. If you drop the lever, you can pull back the highback and at the same time raise the ankle strap. I put on a pair of store boots and tried whipping the feets in and out of the bindings. No problem, plenty of clearance. And when you need to lay the high back flat, you can, just like a regular strap binding.

I currently can’t see a downside to these at all. At $210 in a nyc shop they are definitely priced to move. Perhaps I am just dazzled by the messianic glow that seems to emanate from these sacred bindings, yea, for they are the ones fortold in our ancient snowboarder prophecies.

Now let’s start seeing some decent lacing systems. Go forth and design ye engineers, and produce them for me!

Finally a competitor to FLOW

Flow makes my favorite kinds of bindings for snowboards. They are comfortable and faster to get in and out of than any strap or step-in I’ve ever had. I’ve even been considering buying their $450 Team binding which is amazingly light and wonderful and if it were food I’d eat it. I’d love to link to the product description, but the flow website is of such a coruscatingly brilliant FLASH design that I can just point you to the front page and say good luck. Good luck.

Then this came along and it looks like I have to get my hot little hands on it. My man vlad tells me it has the same sort of fallback highback that flow has. I likes to see competition.

–you know, I’m looking at it, and damn if I can see how it falls back. Perhaps vlad is just retarded, which isn’t altogether impossible. I’ll still go take a look.