Burton Stellar 165

I found myself in the middle of one of the larger storm systems, peaking at 100cms in one 24 hour period. That's a lot of snow, most of it 3%. You could walk to breakfast, and by the time you walked back your tracks would be gone. Luckily this was the time when someone offered me the loan of a Burton Stella, a board I'd never heard of before. The Stellar immediately looked like the business - a little like a Dupraz and those other big powder boards.

I'm not much impressed by big powder boards. Back in the day we'd all ride big boards, with the typical powder ride being a Mk1 Burton Supermodel, ridden at 168 for an agressive 62kgs rider. But that was then and this is now - these days I ride Fish at 156 and Malolos at 158 - with taper and other changes, short boards work fine in powder. The week before playing with the Stellar I was riding waist deep with the best on a 2007 Fish and I didn't feel like I needed more float.

There remain people who ride big boards, typically swallow tails (STs) or Tankers, or the Dupraz which seems to be in a category of its own. Although I'm sure all those boards work fine, I've yet to see anyone ride any of them for two days in a row through serious BC (Blue River) trees. So I'm just inherently skeptial about anything big or with a fancy shape.

1 In the Shop

The Stellar isn't that big, although it looks it in the shop. The image below shows it next to a 160 Salomon, and they're of the same order although the Stellar is obviously bigger. You can see the extremely short tail on the Stellar; the tail's cut out rather than pin (as on the Fish).

The construction of the board is the best I've seen in a production board - way ahead of anything you'll see on a rack in a shop. The edges are perfectly finished, with finely made tip and tail metal inserts. The base is made out of the same stuff my Kessler's base uses: black and slick. The deck is contoured and looks different depending on orientation. Overall the impression the board makes is excellent. There's a hole in the tip for which I couldn't find a use; if you want to hang this up on your wall then it'd be good for that.

I googled the board specs but I'm not sure these are right - the board looks like it has some taper.

2 Setting Up

2.1 ECS/ICS and Hard Bindings

The first obvious problem for those of us who don't/won't use Burton's own EST/ICS bindings is that there are no 4x4 inserts on the board. Instead you get a pair of fin-boxes: a couple of metal channels down the middle of the board into which you need to drop Burton's own bolts and bits.

modified F2 Race Titanium bindings with Burton bolts and washers

This system had kept me off Burton boards produced after the 2007 season - they all had the channel and I couldn't figure out how to get my 8 bolts into that little thing.

Then one day I was in the ski shop with an enthusiastic Dustin, who didn't seem to have any issues with me risking his brand new Stellar under my delicate but assertive hard boots.

Not being one to look a gift horse in the mouth, I jumped at the chance to see if we could make this work. The reason this is now possible is that for the 2010/2011 season Burton have changed the design of their hardware so you can mount standard bindings on there with ordinary bolts. The new hardware is a bit like inserts which you drop into the channel. Once they're in there, you can bolt to them just like ordinary inserts.

So all you need to do is:

1. Drill a couple of holes in the titanium base plate of your bindings (see image). The holes need to be on the centre line of the plate so you can read your angles easily.
2. Get some bolts of the right length and bolt the plates to the board with four of them. I needed to use washers to get the length right, but the mounting is rock solid.

The possible risk here is that as a hard-booter, maybe I can exert more force on the board than the park rat crew. Thinking about that, whilst it's true that hard bingings are more responsive, and impulse is force times time, I can't see how I could apply more force than an obese traditional snowboarder landing badly. In fact the baseplate and damping of the F2 bindings (see image) seem to spread the load pretty well across the deck. The only flex in the system is in the bindings, just like when mounted into 4x4.

Anyway, it works, it's rock solid, and I didn't damage anything although I did not spare board or bindings.

2.2 Other

The fin boxes give plenty of range for stance widths. I set the reference stance and rode that for a day before moving the bindings inwards by a centimeter or two each, giving a more relaxed stance. Adjustment with the fin box system is easy: just four bolts instead of two, and once the bolts are backed off the bindings are easy to move.

3 Riding It

The board's big for someone of my weight, but when you're riding radically large amounts of fresh snow it's "go big or go home". We were in the sort of snow where you're dealing with the need to ride steep in order to penetrate at all, set against the danger of avalanche risk with so much fresh. Although the snow's great, sometimes you simply can't get to it.

In these conditions anything big would work well, and the Stellar was no let-down. It floats as well as anything of this size, although that still made some slopes tough to ride. The base felt amazingly slippy, although that could be the Monashee powder or the ski shop getting the wax right as much as the base. Whatever, it works.

The board's easy to throw around, and anyone who's ridden a big board will feel quickly at home. I didn't find any problem riding trees with the Stellar. In these conditions the board's also very fast, so you do have to be on it or you'll find yourself discovering that helmets are of little use if you're head butting trees. Translation: it's fast, so if you're not, then you may find trees something of a challenge.

The conditions meant that I'd not much chance to experiment with the tail. It's not a Fish and it doesn't feel like a Fish, but I can't yet say how good that tail is at breaking: we had so much snow that you needed all the speed you could get. I did ride a fair bit through reasonably spaced trees and noticed no issues.

As with all these things, it's a question of what you want to do with a board. My feeling is that this board is clearly good on a big day, but as that's all we've had recently I'm unsure how well it will perform when it's a little more consolidated and the trees are a little steeper. The key to tight steep trees is how well the tail works, and most big boards don't get it right (they have too much tail, or it's too stiff). I can't judge how well the Stellar's tail will perform in those conditions just yet.

sick stick versus stellar

4 Judge for Yourself

I only rode the Stellar in stormy weather, so that's what we have here:

5 Questions

Here are some answers to the questions which have come up here and there.

Why Ski boots on a Stellar?

Who said anything about "ski boots"? They're race snowboard boots. They're designed to race snowboards at high speed. Most races are run on ice, but that doesn't mean the gear doesn't work in powder. For me riding through trees particularly requires the ability to turn on demand, precisely, every time. I don't like "slop" in the system. Sooner or later when you push or pull on your boots you want the board to react. I'd like it to be "sooner", that's all.

Often when people ask that question, they really mean something like: "how can you ignore conventional wisdom and use gear I've never seen before?". When we get to that point I usually just suggest we talk about it when they get to the bottom, and offer them the first line. I've ridden with some good riders, but I'm still waiting anyone asking that question to beat me down. When they eventually arrive I just smile.

Bad riders seem to really dislike hard boots; I've never had any hassle or rudeness from anyone who's actually competent or in the business.

There are a few other advantages of hard shell boots in the back country:

• Faster in-out. If you do have to paddle at all, then these are way faster than tie-wraps and Wellington boots.
• Better function at low temperatures. Tie-wraps tend to fail with dull regularity when it's minus thirty.
• My crampons fit on them.
• Warm, comfortable, dry. The ski guys didn't move away from laces and leather for no reason.

The weird thing is how threatened some are by hard boots. My mountaineering boots are hard-shell too, but I never get leather-boot wearing people fretting about what's on my feet!

What angles are those?

About 50 degrees parallel.

What 's all the shouting about?

You're supposed to shout because you're riding with a buddy; some of it's that. Some of it's blowing out the snow. But mostly it's that there are other people out there in the trees and it helps avoid collisions if they know where you are. Snowboards go fast so that's especially important. It works pretty well.

What is the fluorescent band thing?

Ear defenders. Helicopters are noisy and although a little exposure's not going to hurt you a lot will.

Why don't you ride big wide turns?

There are trees in the way.