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Snowboards

Nidecker Mosquito 2021-2022 Snowboard Review

  • Price: £595 / €600 / $620
  • Category: Freeride + Powder
  • Sizes: 148, 152
  • Flex: 8/10
  • Shape: Directional
  • Profile: Combo
  • 3D: No
  • Base: Sintered

From the moment you pull the Mosquito out of its special surf-style sock, you just know what this board is all about. Tight carves, big bottom turns, lip slashes and cover-ups. Want to make your next day on the mountain feel more like a private boat trip? Well buckle up, brah.

“Want to make your next day on the mountain feel more like a private boat trip? Well buckle up, brah”

MORE INFO:
NIDECKER.COM

Who Is The Nidecker Mosquito For?

Riders who don’t really give a shit about the park, or who want a beautiful quiver stick for those epic powder days.

Shape, Profile and Sidecut

Nidecker describe the Mosquito as a high performance fish. It’s a short, wide, whole-heartedly directional silhouette designed to be ridden approximately 5-10 centimetres shorter than your regular board. Much of that length is taken up by the nose, while there’s not much deck to speak of outside the rear inserts before you hit that distinctive double-pointed tail. Is it a swallow? A crescent? We’ll settle for cat ears. As you would expect, you don’t need to work at all to sink the rear – in fact this thing is made to be ridden (surfed?) off the back foot.

Extended rocker at the front keeps the nose skimming easily over deep snow, but don’t mistake this shape for a one-trick powder pony. There’s some trad camber further back – and a deliberately small (read: aggressive) sidecut radius – that help the Mosquito transition easily from tight tree lines to precise corduroy dissection. In a word: agile. And floaty. OK two words.

“Extended rocker at the front keeps the nose skimming easily over deep snow, but don’t mistake this shape for a one-trick powder pony”

Construction and Materials

Rarely will you find a snowboard that’s been put together with this much love. The brains behind Nidecker’s Snow Surf Quiver, Thierry ‘TK’ Kunz, has clearly been inspired by hand-crafted surf shapes. The topsheet is a stunning mix of tinted resin and matt black glassing that deploys both triax and biax fibres in different zones. Overall it delivers a stiff, responsive flex, and by wrapping the topsheet over the side to meet a narrow 2mm sidewall you get more direct power transfer into the edge as well as a beautiful, neat finish. Although it’s short, this is no easy-going jib stick – you really want good turning technique and some power in your legs to harness its potential.

The core is made from three different woods: poplar for springiness, paulownia for its lightweight properties and beech for added strength near the edges. It would be a shame to cheap out on the base at this point, so the Mosquito duly rounds things off with a piece of N-9000 sintered P-tex. Yes, that’s a lot of thousands. Yes, it’s black. And yes, it’s beyond quick.

“Rarely will you find a snowboard that’s been put together with this much love”

Roundup

Maybe someone, somewhere, is working on a surfboard that borrows shamelessly from snowboard design. Good luck to them if they are. In our world, brands like Nidecker continue to find inspiration in the original sideways culture and the idea of riding the mountain like a wave. The Mosquito has executed that brief brilliantly, seamlessly merging the aesthetic of the shaping bay with hard-nosed carving technology. Bring on the 50 year storm.

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