K2 Excavator $550
Last year, K2’s Alchemist won our Gear of the Year award. This year, the brand’s wunderkind snowboard designer, J. Stone, has done it again with the Excavator: a contemporary carver that crushes corduroy, surfs slush, slashes through bottomless powder, and puts fun first. Genetically, the Excavator and Alchemist might be brothers. Both decks sport camber underfoot, rockered noses, bamboo backbones, speedy carbon-infused bases, and notched tails bolstered with carbon stringers for stability and snap. But the Excavator is a fat “volume-shifted” shape, meaning it’s designed to be ridden several centimeters shorter than your everyday all-mountain board. It’s also softer and surfier than the torpedo-like Alchemist.
Still, veteran testers couldn’t help but compare the two. The consensus is that the Excavator outfloats the Alchemist, at least at lower…
