I was being mindful, too, of not pushing too hard until I had a better sense of my foundation, though that concern quickly vanished. I kept things middle-of-trail in the early going, since my physiology was enduring a micro-revolt as it tried to recall long-dormant motor skills in hindsight, stretching first to give my body a heads up would have been prudent. That snowfall yielded an especially hospitable hillside, with few patches of ice yawning through and wide areas of scarcely-touched powder on the sides of many runs. The cold wasn’t all that cold in Park City, and thanks to an ongoing storm, conditions were superlative at the Mountain Resort: The area was being dumped on during the Festival weekend, with some four feet of snow materializing to use the most universal of storm size measures, Uber surge prices in Park City started around 6x and went as high as 12x for an SUV during peak evening hours. As soon as I learned there was an Adidas Samba snowboard boot, and people seemed to like it, that was that. It didn’t matter that I was a Burton loyalist while growing up, or that other new models caught my eye.
It was early in my pre-trip Googling for “best snowboard boots,” then, that I came across the Adidas Samba, which was surprising - in my time away from snowboarding I had missed that Adidas had gotten into the game, and done so with a model name primarily associated with the soccer-style shoes I wore in sixth grade. I was happy to ride whatever duffer plank I rented for the afternoon, but had no desire to plunge my feet into the dank orifices of loaner boots.
No time away from riding could erase my memories of rental shop grab-bag footwear, with lining that’s perma-damp for some indeterminate reason, and assorted internal facets and ridges ready to claw at your high ankle as soon as you’ve set off on your first run. What I wasn’t willing to risk was a pair of uncomfortable boots. It had been five years since my last snowboarding session, and since my Park City outing was one of opportunity during a work trip to Utah for the Sundance Film Festival, my preparation had entailed simply raiding the dregs of my winter sports gear bag. And though I have a helmet, I can’t remember when I bought it, or why: it’s a Burton RED model colored a shade of deep brown that would prompt a living coil of feces to remark, “Christ, that looks like shit,” with a spherical shape that will be sub-optimal if aerodynamics ever actually matter in my riding. My gloves were adequate but old, with palm padding that was breaking down in real time, leaving trails of tiny black debris on anything I touched. That combo kept my torso dry, but because of the limited body coverage, every time my butt hit the mountain - be it when I was strapping into my board or, as the day went on, eating shit - fistfulls of slope would do flume runs down Ned Canyon. My proper snowsports coat was at my in-laws’s place, so I was wearing a waist-length winter bomber jacket with an autumn-weight rainjacket as a waterproof shell. I’ve never liked the way goggles limit peripheral vision, so I don’t own a pair instead I typically snowboard with a pair of sunglasses - except for when I forget to bring them to the mountain, which, on this day: that. Let’s talk first about what I didn’t have, standing atop a Park City Mountain Resort trail in Utah on a 17-degree day in late January.
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