
The Best Snowboards of 2015 for Any Rider
Six snowboards perfect for different types of riding, whether you’re heading to the Alaskan backcountry, your local mountain or the streets of downtown Salt Lake City.

Six snowboards perfect for different types of riding, whether you’re heading to the Alaskan backcountry, your local mountain or the streets of downtown Salt Lake City.
By Sung Han

Packing perfectly for the Baja Peninsula in Mexico means being prepared for everything — because anything can, and will, happen.

We like to get our hands on new gear early, and short of theft and corporate espionage one of the best ways to do that is by checking out Outdoor Retailer, a biannual product show for retailers, manufacturers and other industry pros. We were on hand at the Winter Market 2014 show at the Salt Palace Convention Center in Salt Lake City, UT, where every brand with a stake in the great outdoors showed off their future cold-weather wares.

Deep powder is a religious experience, and it takes just one perfect day of blue skies and bottomless snow to become a pious worshiper. From Alyeska to Taos, powderhounds feverishly monitor weather reports for the next big storm, and after spending a weekend skiing 12,000-foot ridges in Telluride, we know exactly why: powder skiing is as close as man can get to flying in the mountains.

A new pair of skis is more than just a new piece of expensive gear: it’s an investment in winter stoke.

Now in its seventh season, the Salomon Freeski TV channel has covered the sport exhaustively.

[click on image to enlarge] The groundhog may have said we still have six more weeks of winter but Spring is still nearing and that means wet weather. Time to gear up.
By Eric Yang