 Poster: A snowHead
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Just came across an old photograph, maybe 25 years old. A group photo of a day a few of us went snowboarding.
The interesting thing was we were all wearing ski boots.
Never realised hard boots were ever worn snowboarding, was this just the hire shop not having soft boots or was everyone wearing hard boots in the early days ?
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Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
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Quite a few of our seasoned Snowheads snowboarders still prefer the tupperware boot to the softboot.
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Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
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My first snowboarding lesson at the Sheffield Ski Village in 1994 was in Ski Boots with hard bindings on a 172 Nidecker direction carving board!
Once I saw all the "cool" kids where going off ramps in soft boots and small boards (148) I soon made the switch.
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You need to Login to know who's really who.
You need to Login to know who's really who.
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In Europe pretty much all you could get in the late 1980s was hard boots & bindings. The US stuff was more skate oriented and didn't really take over until the early 1990s. There's still a hard core (I'm one of them) of hard boot snowboarders - check snowboard racing in the Olympics to see the gear.
Ski boots work, but you're probably never going to see anyone actually wearing them today: snowboard race boots have flex characteristics and binding footprints which mean they work better. There's even a new race boot this year (the yellow ones in the Olympics). Expert soft and hard boot riders can be indistinguishable (unless someone's riding in a very stylized way).
Hard boots make it easier to hold an edge on hard pack and are undeniably more responsive... but that latter means they're probably also harder to learn in. You rarely see hard booters who can't rip (possibly because they have mostly been practising since the 1980s). Skiers who think snowboarders are slow and useless would benefit from riding with hard booters. If they can keep up,
If coolness is one's aim then you're probably on the wrong web site, but hard boots are for people who want to ride fast, not for anyone looking to be "cool".
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I may not have been the first to ride at Sheffield in the late 1980s, but when I did first go there I had to persuade the manager to let me ride at all, snowboards weren't permitted. I was undoubtedly on race ski boots at that time.
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Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
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I seem to remember playing a snowboard game in the 90s (possibly cool boarders), where depending on what style of board you chose, you got "soft" boots or "hard" boots that looked like ski boots. Think the foot angle is slightly more toe-forward in the hard boots isn't it?
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You'll need to Register first of course.
You'll need to Register first of course.
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Its be a rare rider who wore hard boots and ran a duck stance. All the hardbooters I've ever encountered had big agressive +/+ setups.
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