The Preseason Checklist: Get Your Gear Ready Before First Chair
Every year the first storm hits and the service queue at every shop in town triples overnight. The riders who handled their gear in the fall are on the hill that weekend. Everyone else is waiting on a bench slot. Here is the checklist we run on our own gear before the lifts spin.
The board
- Base: look for dry, chalky areas and any gouges that made it through last season. Deep ones need P-Tex before they collect water and grow.
- Edges: check for rust and burrs. Surface rust from summer storage polishes out easily; pitted rust is a job for the shop stones.
- Wax: if you stored the board with a thick storage coat, scrape and brush it. If you did not, it needs a proper hot wax before the first day, because a base that sat dry all summer soaks up the first coat like a sponge.
Boots and bindings
- Liners: pull them out, check the footbeds, and be honest about pack-out. If your heels were lifting by the end of last season, that is not going to have improved over the summer. A boot fit check now beats discovering it on a powder day.
- Laces and buckles: frayed laces and cracked ratchet straps fail on cold days, which is to say, exactly when you are using them. They are cheap to replace at home and annoying to replace in a parking lot.
- Hardware: every binding screw, checked with a real screwdriver. Screws back themselves out over a season of vibration, and a lost stance screw ends more days than broken gear does.
The soft goods audit
Wash your shell layers with a technical wash and re-up the water repellency. Check goggle lenses for scratches and delamination now, while replacements are in stock everywhere, including our gear wall. Gloves: if last season ended with cold hands, that answer will not change by itself.
Or hand us the whole list
Our preseason tune covers the entire board side of this list in one drop-off: base repair, edge restore, and a fresh temperature-matched wax. Early fall is the quiet window when turnaround is fastest, and the calendar fills the moment the first storm shows up in the forecast. Beat the queue.
