Easy-to-use Step On interface paired with a carbon blend high back for responsive, all-mountain performance.
There have been a few sticky topics in the history of snowboarding. For the sake of space, we’re going to skip over speed suits. First off, leashes. Back in the day, you’d constantly get hassled by lifties and ski patrollers to make sure you were wearing a leash. Why? Because should your snowboard somehow, by some freak incident, fall off of your foot while you were riding the lift, that sucker would turn into a heat-seeking missile, looking to take out any and every one in its path. While in theory, this would be the case for a runaway snowboard, in practice, snowboards just don’t fall off. The second sticky topic in snowboarding, at least with the crusty old dudes, has been step-in bindings.
In the 90s, a few brands touched on the topic, and while some worked more conveniently than others, they all worked, and were actually fairly bulletproof. This concept, where you could just snap in and get on your way cruising down the mountain was awesome. You weren’t slowing down your skiing friends (you were probably hanging out with them only because they were your ride to the hill), and you could beat your snowboarding friends to that perfect pow stash! And…don’t forget dry butt. Regardless, there was mass panic over this different way of attaching your feet to a snowboard. Why? No clue, other than it was different. I guess people just felt more security in two thin, often brittle, chintzy plastic straps being their mental comfort blankie between life and death.
Silly.
No stranger to looking fear straight in the eye, Burton went back to the drawing board in 2018, and through the process of combining decades of product research and design, and knowing a thing or two about boots and bindings, developed the awesome Step On interface. It’s simple and the directions are as follows. Be sure to read carefully because this gets pretty complicated.
Step 1: You step into your binding, just as you would do with straps.
Step 2: You snowboard.
– Mike Basher
Burton Step On X Re:Flex Binding – $399.95
For more, check out www.burton.com and @burtonsnowboards.
This year, the Snowboard Magazine Platinum Picks Awards are sliding into their fourteenth season as the largest, most in-depth gear review of its kind. Thousands of great products from every category on the market have been narrowed down to a select few that our editors have reviewed, tinkered with, analyzed, and photographed. Our goal is to inform, educate, and help guide your buying decisions this winter, so you end up with the very best gear for your time on the mountain. In the 2022 Platinum Picks, you’ll find an assortment of amazing boards, boots, bindings, goggles, helmets, jackets, pants, and more that we have deemed The Best of ’22.
