Snowboard Canada’s first-ever Grade EH Board Awards

80 boards, 15 testers, 3 dozen winners, one Red Mountain

by Scott Birke

Here at Snowboard Canada, we’ve been batting around the idea of board tests for years now. And at SBC we wanted to do them right—and right in the middle of winter, when most of us ride, rather than in the softer spring snow that usually forms the battleground for such testing.

We chose Red Mountain, near Rossland, B.C in the south Kootenays to do our testing because from its park and hit runs to powder and cliff drops, it had everything you’d experience riding in this great country of ours. And an expected abundance of snow, usual for Red Mountain, we’re told, during our testing period didn’t hurt either. To say the testers were stoked on Red, would be the biggest of understatements.

Our testing crew of consisted of former pros Rube Goldberg, Jesse Fox, Daryl Trinidad, Jon Roth, Gerhard Gross, Matt Beaudry, and Keith Martin; current contest judges Carter Smith and Akasha Weisgarber; and yours truly, Scott Birke to run the show. On the women’s side, we had contest-killer Molly Milligan, former pro Amanda Mourant and local rippers Hannah Bilodeau, Jessica Poulin and Rachel Newton. It was a combined total of almost 250 years of shred experience that went into these tests—experience that allowed us to have 100 per cent confidence in the results.

Our methodology (pun fully intended) was simple. Testers had to ride a board long enough to get a feel for it before filling out its scorecard, which was tallied and averaged at the end to determine the top dozen boards in each category. Full reviews of all 80 of the boards under each category/l all-mountain freestyle, park and women’s boards.

Thanks to Erik Kalacis and Mika Hakkola at Red Mountain, and Cindy Burr at Tourism B.C and HelloBC.com/ski for their help with making this possible.

CLICK HERE for reviews of all the ALL-MOUNTAIN FREESTYLE boards

CLICK HERE for reviews of all the PARK boards

CLICK HERE for reviews of all the WOMENS boards