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I’m a shameless promoter of Flow bindings–the convenience is outstanding, for one thing. So sometimes I get the feeling that I’m part of a secret society.

Today I made what is probably my last local trip to the “mountain,” and the end of the season is near. (As a marker, the pond-skimming contest was today.) I was at the base of one lift when I fellow with an Arbor board (I’ll call him Mike, though I forget his name) asked to ride up the lift with me.

It’s rare for someone to ask to share a chair, so I readily agreed. It turns out that Mike wanted to talk about Flow bindings. I have a pair of NXT-AT. Mike had a pair, too, though I never did make out what they were.

We then talked about boards. Mike was sporting an Arbor, a brand I like because it’s got a good reputation and equally important, their topsheets generally don’t look have a goth feel or resemble the imagination of someone on acid.

At the top of the hill Mike called some of his friends to hold up. One rode away anyway, but then three of us talked about Flow bindings. We all had one model or another.

Like I said, it sometimes feels like a secret society, or maybe a consumer cult, in the way that some people are obsessed with White Castle hamburgers or moon pies or whatever. And it’s a nice addition to the day when I find someone who is equally enthusiastic about the Flow concept.

If you read a newspaper article, book chapter or other publication describing a place where people go skiing and snowboarding, commonly known as a ski area, you’re likely to find a mistake.

Here’s an excerpt from an article published in the Daily Herald, a newspaper published in the suburbs of Chicago.

Stats: Five slopes: two beginner, two intermediate (includes terrain for snowboarders), one advanced; around-the-clock snow-making capability and a routine grooming schedule to ensure best possible conditions.

Did you catch the error? It’s partly obscured, so let me call it out for you: terrain parks are for snowboarders, and the natural place for snowboarders is in a terrain park.

It is true that for many snowboarders, their snowboarding experience is largely confined to hitting the features in a terrain park. But not all snowboarders spend most of their time there. Nor is snowboarding defined exclusively by what happens in the terrain park. There’s also alpine carving and, for lack of a better word, freeriding, which is what you might simply call “snowboarding.”

In addition, not all terrain park users are snowboarders. Thanks to the development of twin-tip skis, terrain parks are increasingly popular with skiers.

So confining snowboarders to the terrain park is a disservice to both snowboarders and skiers.

My own freestyle experience is limited to doing a 50/50 boardslide down a funbox or making some turns in a halfpipe. My impression is that most snowboarders over 40 spend most of their time outside of the park, too.

Agree? Disagree? Leave a comment.

An article about a 43-year old science teacher in Iowa gives us a good portrait of a mature rider who enjoys the sport as a way to challenge herself.

Susan Maurice, who teaches at a middle school, says that her students can benefit from her example. Then again, so can the rest of us.

My message is this: If you don’t try something you are not proficient at, you will never begin to address the obstacles on the road to success. I did it – I was fearful and anxious, but still persisted in my lack of ability. I am hoping that when my students see my attempt, they will know that the success is in the trying what is not comfortable – and you can achieve if you believe.

She received a couple of medals in a statewide event. Granted, she was the only person in her age group in the halfpipe and slopestyle event, so a podium finish was guaranteed. And that which was once not comfortable is now something she enjoys and can take pride in. That’s an accomplishment.

If you want to see some videos giving you tips on snowboarding, there are plenty out there. Most, however, are of freestyle tricks. They also tend to have what is, to my ears at least, an unbearable soundtrack.

But what if you’re interested in finding some videos that give you some help in the basics of snowboarding? Finally, some are available. You can find out more about them in the newly revised videos page of the Grays on Trays^® site.

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.

This season I’ve spent some time on NASTAR. It’s a race program that uses a handicap system and age brackets. It is dominated by skiers (after all, the program was started by Ski magazine), but snowboarders can participate.

Here are the sex and age distributions of snowboarding NASTAR participants, according to the latest rankings.

Men:
40 to 44: 133
45 to 49: 122
50 to 54: 56
55 to 59: 34
60 to 64: 18
65 to 69: 8
70 to 74: 2
Total men: 240
Males, all ages:

Women
40 to 44: 36
45 to 49: 24
50 to 54: 10
55 to 59: 9
60 to 64: 3
65 to 69: 1
Total women: 83

Men, all age groups: 2,624
Women, all age groups: 652

That’s a total of 323 snowboarders age 40 and up who have participated in NASTAR–a statistical footnote in the large scope of NASTAR. On the other hand, they make up more than half (56 percent) of all snowboarding participants in NASTAR.

My own ranking in this universe is fairly poor, at about the 30th percentile for all males as well as for my own age group.

On the other hand, if you look at men in my age group who ride in a soft-boot setup and ride duck, then I might be in line for some sort of prize.

Ah, the various ways to slice the universe to stroke the ego.

Say you’re with some people who are just starting out in snowboarding, they need some time to practice on easy slopes, and you want to hang out with them. What can you do to make the time more interesting if you’re a more advanced rider?

Here are some things that you can do to make a slope that might be so as to be uninteresting more challenging:

Keep one foot out.
Ride down the hill with only your front foot in the binding. This reinforces the idea that your front foot should be doing the steering. You should find it difficult. If you find it extremely difficult, it may mean that you’re kicking out your back foot to make turns—a move that will make for skidded turns.

Make your turns smaller and smaller.
Start out by using the lift towers as objects to slalom around. Then move to somewhere else on the slope and start making your turns successively shorter so that you’re nearly going with the fall line. (Start out saying “1, 2, 3, 4, turn,” and then “1, 2, 3, turn.”) Be careful to time when do this, as it will mean that you’ll reach the chair much sooner than your friends who are beginners.

Practice filming other people.
Keeping your eye on a moving target while you are moving yourself is a challenge!

Point your board in the other direction.
Your board has a tip, which is first part of the board to start a turn, and a tail, which is the last. Don’t do anything different with your bindings, but start looking towards the tail of your board as you slide, so that it, not the tip, leads you down the hill. This will be a challenge for many people. If you have a directional board, you’ll have the extra challenging of having a smaller turning radius.

Flip your bindings 180 degrees from where they are now.
Keep using the tip of the board to lead you down the hill. But take your bindings off the board and flip them around so that your toes will point in the opposite direction (along the length of the board) of what they’re used to. Like the previous activity, this means that you’ll have a different lead foot than what you’re used to. It’s just a bit more complicated in that you’ve got to go to the trouble of remounting your bindings.

If you ride a symmetrical twin-tip board and use a stance of zero-zero degrees, there’s no distinction between these two “tricks.” Otherwise, the differences between the two can range from subtle to dramatic, depending on the sidecut of the board, binding angles, and how far the bindings are set from the tip of the board.

Get small.
Ride on an ultra-short snowboard, such as the Rossignol Mini. It will give you a different feel than your regular board, and make it easier to perform some of the other items on this list.

Spin.
There are lots of spins, including those down by riders who launch themselves into the air and make two or three complete revolutions, five or fifteen feet in the air. You’re not interest in that? That’s OK; few older folks will be. Keep it on the ground and you’ll have enough of a challenge. As you go into a turn, keep turning so that you make a complete revolution. Once you get that down, string several spins together. You’ll probably find that it’s easier to do this by looking into the spin (frontside spin) or backing into the spin (backside spin). Perfect one and then try the other.

A new way off the lift.
Ride off the lift with your “open” binding leading the way. This will make getting off the chair lift more interesting.

Do movement analysis.
That’s the technical term for watching other people on the hill, observing what they are doing, and deciphering how what they do with their knees, ankles, shoulders, etc. affects their riding. You can pick up some good “Don’t do that” tips this way. For example, if a man has his arms spread wide and in front of him, like an outrigger, what does that tell you?

Teach your friends, if you have training to do so.
During a couple of seasons I taught through a ski school. On occasions I teach friends free of charge. But teaching is more difficult than it first appears. Make sure you have proper training, or you could help your friends develop bad habits.

Naturally, you should attempt any of these only if you have adequate space and customer traffic allows. Remember the responsibility code.

In high school, I got really good grades, graduating in the top 5 in a class of about 350. But I had a math teacher who liked to help his students keep from getting cocky. “You’re big fish in a little pond,” he would occasionally remind the students of his advanced classes, some of whom would then go off to be small students in the big ponds such as the University of Michigan.

I thought of Mr. Bernadini today when I pulled a glossy brochure from NASTAR out of my mailbox.

“YOU QUALIFIED!,” reads the top of the brochure. “CONGRATULATIONS” runs down the side.

Me? Apparently so.

The inside of the brochure explains: Congratulations! You qualified for the 2009 Nature Valley NASTAR National Championships! You ranked in the top 3 in your age & gender category in your division at a participating Nature Valley NASTAR resort as of February 16, 2009.

I’m honored, I guess. But it all reminds me of one-year career as coronet player. I was third chair. Out of three students. Sometimes I was second chair, though–when the other kid didn’t show up.

Nationally, I haven’t done so hot: Right now, I’m 97 out of over 115 in my class, nationally, and certainly below the 50th percentile of all men who race on snowboards. A country salesman I once knew said that he “was in the half of my graduating class that made the top half possible.” I feel the same way about my place in the racing world.

Is it in fact true that I’m in the top three of my ski area only because there aren’t four men of my age on a board? Perhaps. I do know that a fellow I’ve shared with the course with is in fact national caliber when it comes to running GS gates on a board. Then again, he has an alpine setup with binding angles that are about 3 degrees each, hard boots, a carving board built for speed–and lots of practice and perhaps little fear.

But I’ve qualified anyway. Will I go to Steamboat Springs and partake? I’d like to get there sometime, but it probably won’t happen this year. Besides, I hear that it’s really the place to ride in the trees.

I suppose it’s time to take back, at least partly, my complaint about ski areas grooming away the powder.

My preference for powder over groomers remains. But today I got a better appreciation for the value of stomping down the powder: It keeps the base around longer.

This fact is one of those things you know in your head, but have to experience to truly appreciate.

Last week, this is what I saw:

A golf course cart path. The path is not in this case part of the ski trail, and the ski trails themselves were not melting away. Still, the visible cart path and the visible grass were both bad signs for the snowboard and ski season.

Today, the path was not visible. Nor was the grass. Areas that had lost their snow were now good off-the-path places to catch some slight (about 4 inches) powder. And the groomed slopes had an addition applied to their base.

Was I disappointed to find that the only powder available was on the extreme outside edges of the trails? Certainly. On the other hand, the packed-and-groomed new snow should now make for a better rest of the season.

You’ve heard about Sony Bono, one of the Kennedys and other people getting killed from skiing into trees? If you’re going faster than, say, 25 miles per hours–very easy on a groomed slope–and you hit a tree head-on, no helmet will save you.

You could argue that there’s no more enjoyable kind of riding than riding in powder, among the trees. I might have to agree with you. I spent my childhood in a house on a 1.5 acre lot that had plenty of 70-foot tall (or higher) pines. And during the last season I enjoyed riding among the trees at Bretton Woods, Buttermilk, and Snowmass. There’s something interesting and sometimes thrilling about being in a forest. The shape and color of the trees adds variety, especially if the trees are evergreen. Trees simply give a descent down the mountain a different feel.

But trees can be deadly, and not only because of the possibility of head injuries. There’s also suffocation in tree wells, which are areas right next to the trunk of a tree. Ironically, they don’t have as much snow as the ground a few further away from the trunk.

Does all this mean that you shouldn’t ride in the trees? Only if the fact that people die in automobile crashes keeps you from ever being in a car. The key is not to avoid risk entirely, but to minimize it.

Last year, Shayboarder offered up some useful information on how to ride safely through trees. See also the site Tree Well Safety.