Wed, 02/24/2010 - 1:16pmKnow your freeride snowboard

Freeride, the natural home of the soul brothers riding the great white wave.

Not this time out though. This time we’re taking a look at aggressive charging machines. We’re not really talking about swallow-tails and powder guns. We’re talking about aggressive, work-hard, play-hard boards built for mach 10 and straight-lining.

The only thing holding these back is the size of your balls. If you like to strap in and blast off, this could be the category for you. If you’re at home blasting pistes and hitting the pow, then you would do well to take a look. The charging board comes in a few guises, not necessarily sitting completely in the freeride camp, many come from the all mountain end of the spectrum, and display more versatile characteristics. They are all stiff as you like though, with a fair amount of tech jammed in.
 

Freeride DNA

Shape

Directional for the more hardcore end of the category, directional twin for the more ambidextrous side. A long nose is essential though to get that powder float. It just depends on whether you feel like running things in reverse or not.
 

 

Sidecut radius

Anything to get you smashing it down the hill faster is good. Multi radius sidecuts built to power you out of the turn are always good. Long radius sidecuts will help keep things together at speed too.
 

Length and waist width

Towards the longer end of your comfort zone. This will help with powder float as well as composure at speed. Obviously jibbing might be a bit of a struggle though.
 

Camber

It’s up to you people. Reverse camber will help with pow float, but will compromise your top-speed control on the hard stuff. If you win a Chinese downhill on a reverse camber, it is generally accepted that you will be beating the ladies off with a stick.
 

Flex rating

Stiff is good. If you want to keep going hard all day, you don’t want a flaccid length under your feet.
 

Topsheet

As many axials as you can get. Triax or quad. The stiffer fibreglass should help hold things together as you approach the sound barrier. Obviously it will push the price up, but it’ll definitely be worth it.
 

 

Base

As fast as you can muster. High number sintered is good, but also look for nano sintered these days. Basically anything that will hold the wax into the base for longer and keep you running friction-free.
 

What is freeriding?

Good question,  for the purpose of our gear categories it is charging down the mountain like a bat out of hell, somewhere between Seth Westcott at the Olympics and Xavier de Le Rue at the Verbier Extreme.
 

 

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Related stories:

Snowboards

• An intro to buying a snowboard
• Jib snowboards
• Freestyle snowboards
• All mountain snowboards
• Freeride snowboards
• Backcountry snowboards
• The shape
• The topsheet
• The base
• The sidewall

Boots

• Buying a set of boots

Bindings

• Buying bindings

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