Some people can afford to buy a board exclusively for powder days. For the rest of us, there's Burton's unisex Malolo. While the Malolo has a wide shape for blasting untracked face shots, it borrows the best of freestyle elements and all-terrain versatility. There are other all-terrain snowboards that lay claim to doing it all, but the Malolo has the width and powder-specific gravity to get you there with more float and less leg burn than those so-called utility tools. Inside the Malolo is a Powder Fly II Core that moves the Malolo's center of gravity back, resulting in a softer, lighter nose that promotes easy float in deep snow. The surfy Burton Fish snowboard offers the same core with a little more float potential, but the Malolo remains true to its wonderfully wide freestyle shape. This season Burton added a shorter, 149-cm. size for lighter advanced riders. They also installed 10:45 rounded sidewalls with two distinct angles to minimize abuse, especially if you tend to seek out powder in gladed runs. If you could cut the Malolo open (don't do it…) you would see that the wood grain along the toe and heel edges runs perpendicular to the rest of the wood core in a design called DualZone Edge Grain Direction, a process that enhances edging while adding durability. This is wrapped in long layer of Triax Fiberglass topped off with two more diagonal layers, resulting in a torsional stiffness that translates to intuitive carving and easy turn initiation. Beneath all this high-float goodness is Burton's Sintered WFO Vision Base (the "Vision" means that you can see the graphics clearly without losing anything in the warp drive output). If you live for backcountry adventures and helicopter ascents into places that the tourists can only dream about, the Malolo snowboard is your ticket to winter bliss. If you're looking for a powder board with a surf style, check out the Burton Fish.