Powder Magazine - Not Another Gear Guide 2024

IN FACT, YOU SHOULDN’T PUT BLIND FAITH in any gear reviews, no matter where they are published. In 2015 the University of Chicago School of Business published a statistical analysis of home field advantage in professional sports. Without getting too deep into it, the study found that, yes, home field advantage does actually exist, and that the cause is not the rigors of travel or the support of the crowd inspiring players to dig a little deeper. It’s officiating bias. These are professional referees, the best in their field. They go into each game intending to be the most fair and objective they can. But when 80,000 people applaud one action, and treat another with scorn, it’s only human nature that some favoritism will creep into even the most unbiased…

SKIER Sage Cattabriga-Alosa LOCATION Girdwood, Alaska PHOTOGRAPHER Nic Alegre/TGR SKIER Eric Hjorleifson LOCATION Stubai Valley, Tyrol, Austria PHOTOGRAPHER Max Draeger SKIER Sammy Carlson LOCATION Revelstoke Backcountry, British Columbia PHOTOGRAPHER Daniel Stewart SKIER Nick McNutt LOCATION Esplanade Range, British Columbia PHOTOGRAPHER Robin O’Neill SKIER NICOLE CORDINGLY LOCATION Alta, Utah PHOTOGRAPHER Lee Cohen SKIER AIlo Riponiemi LOCATION Espoo, Finland PHOTOGRAPHER Arttu Heikkinen SKIER Bobby Brown LOCATION Alta Lakes, Colorado PHOTOGRAPHER Brett Schreckengost…

“GROUND CONTROL TO MAJOR TOM, YOUR CIRCUIT’S DEAD THERE’S SOMETHING WRONG…” To many people outside of the ski culture, pulling the plug on a competitive internship and subsequent engineering job at SpaceX would seem rather drastic, especially for a young graduate starting his career. For Kyle Siegel, founder of recently launched Raide Equipment, the freedom of ski bumming was too strong. His step off the corporate conveyor belt laid the foundation for launching a brand that, in one year, has challenged producers of innovative gear for human-powered adventures. Originally from Chicago, Siegel grew up skiing only a handful of days a year. That all changed when he attended Harvey Mudd College in Southern California, and experienced a taste for ski culture through trips to Mammoth. Since then, the dual passions…

AS WELL KNOWN AS ERIC HJORLEIFSON IS for his drifty turns and cat-like descents of pillow lines and steep alpine faces, he’s equally well known for his tinkering. From skis like the 4FRNT Renegade, to his eponymous Dynafit boot, Hoji has been altering the status quo in backcountry touring for nearly 15 years. However, his recent collaboration and engineering mentorship by Fritz Barthel—inventor of the low-tech binding patented and licensed by Dynafit in 1990—has transformed Hoji into possibly the most disruptive force in backcountry skiing. The duo’s friendship developed organically, meeting and skiing together at a 2014 Dynafit event in Switzerland. At the time Barthel didn’t even know who Hoji was. And though Hoji knew what he wanted in terms of performance, he was stuck in a cycle of merely…

WE GEAR EDITORS TALK A LOT about silly trends in our industry—everything from the hottest outerwear colors for apré s, to why hybrid bindings will change your skiing (or won’t), to the most versatile waist width for mid-winter pond skims. Most of the time, I’ll admit, these trends are in fact just that: silly. Once in a while, though, a real movement quietly comes along that perhaps showcases a shift in design thinking across the whole industry. Since we switched from soft leather boots to the modern plastic ski boot, there has been a seemingly unbridgeable divide between the performance of boots designed to go up the mountain and those designed purely for downhill pursuits. For us mere mortals, that performance gap wasn’t super noticeable, with most of us happily…

IT CAN BE SAID that Italians like nice things: fine wines, a delicious formaggio, fast red sports cars driven in fancy leather jackets, even high-tech ski touring bindings. In fact, there’s a famous valley outside of Bologna, Italy that produces all of those things: wheels of Parmigiano Reggiano, bottles of fizzy Lambrusco, the roaring engines of Ferraris, and the subtle click of stepping into an ATK ski touring binding. The story of ATK Bindings begins in 2006 inside a machine shop in the Emilia-Romagna valley where Giovanni Indulti and his wife, Guerrina, manufactured all manner of metal tooling and componentry for the automotive industry. Neither were particularly interested in ski touring, preferring the comfort of a gondola or chairlift, but after a local competitive skimo racer came to the factory…