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Review: Prior Spearhead Splitboard

Prior’s Spearhead splitboard offered our reviewer some options that made him think outside the box and smile along the way.

By

Alex Palombo

Alex Palombo on his green-based Prior Spearhead splitboard.

In the spring of 2024, I went crazy, resulting in three new splitboards. I lived on a Forest Service compound in rural Alaska, where mail arrived through the district office’s front desk. Our front desk guy, Hippie Jim, a former ski shop owner in Girdwood, AK, gave me a look of disbelief when the second…

Responses

  1. David Hubbell

    Imagine you are sitting on a stopped chairlift a few feet off the ground with skis on. a person grabs the tip of a ski and slowly levers it around, you cannot really resist until your knee fails, ouch. Now imagine you are on there with a board, both feet strapped in. Same mean person tries to rotate the tip of your board around in a circle. Because both legs are attached to the board, about two feet apart, your hips and core have tremendously more power to control the tip than the power that one leg has to resist rotation of a single ski. Smack that mean lifty down! The point is, a human can control the length of a snowboard way more than the same length of a ski because two feet are attached and the board rotation is controlled by large quad and hamstring muscle groups. Snowboard length for all-around powder riding should be the same as the length of a powder ski.

    1. Barry Wicks

      I like the visual David. I was just in Japan and saw some 200cm + powder snowboards in the tram line up. Nothing that big as a split board though. There must be a downside to huge boards, or maybe, as I’ve postulated in the past, surface area maybe has more to do with flotation than length. I do want to try one of those monster boards in deep pow on wide open terrain. I can imagine it being mind blowing! https://the-high-route.com/snowboard-theory/

      1. Seth Holton

        I occasionally ride a 181 at baker.
        The pros are obvious but the cons are getting through confined spaces when exiting the alpine.

  2. Alex Palombo

    Swallowtail splitboards aside, the largest stock splitboard I’m aware of is a Tahoelabs Directional 181. It appears Venture stopped making boards in the 181 length. There are of course custom options out there to get a splitboard that big, I know Prior will do it. Speaking of swallowtails, if any of you fine folks have been on the Voile Swallowtail in the 190, I’d be interested to hear your experience. People seem to rave about those boards.

    David I hear you, what you’re saying is also the same concept that makes snowboarding in variable snow fun. And in a perfect open sloped world, everyone would be riding snowboards the same length as skis, human height dependent of course. But, as Seth says, getting from your car to those open slopes is often what is problematic riding boards that big. I want to make the claim that everyone is riding boards that are too small for them, but its likely more a factor of what they want out of their backcountry experience. However, it seems the splitboarders of The High Route are kindred spirits on the longer planks. So i that being said, I think most people ride boards that are too small 🙂

    Barry, your article was a great read and got me thinking about what has more surface area, my 186cm Voiles that are 105 underfoot or my Prior 172? It would be interesting to run calculations to see, but i think surface area is only a piece of the puzzle. The shape and camber are also helping you to gain “float”. Maybe these are hard concepts to quantify, as there is a lot of variability in body weight and snow conditions, and “float” isn’t exactly a scientific concept.

  3. David Hubbell

    Ha! It’s fun to talk about people’s perceptions of snowboards 10-15cm longer being hard to turn in powder. From my experience building deeply-rockered custom boards for early and mid-winter Utah fluff, snowboards are usually felt to be hard to turn in tight spaces when you have a lighter weight rider fighting against the camber in a board in lower density snow or when they are really tired from a long day. For example, a 100-115 pound woman can dice up a line through shrubbery with a very soft or rockered 165, while she will find a firmer-flexing, cambered 150-155 to be not playful and require a lot of input/fight instead of smile-generating playfulness. Same for a 155lb guy on a 170-175cm. I think the industry’s tendency to tune the flex+camber of a 165-169ish for the heaviest snowboarders is just goofy and reduces the availability of high float longer boards that are at the same time fun and playful through the timber and brush.

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