Gear/Auto

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photo: Jon Whittle

The Ogio Soft Taco board bag is tough as nails, but weighs in at just 2.5 pounds and folds to nothing when the boards hit the roof rack.
*Ogio Soft Taco board bag, $79.99. Weather-treated polyester, in Hoth Camo.
ogio.com

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photo: Courtesy of Michele Marin

Say goodbye to that smelly, two-stroke engine, and to those love handles while you're at it. Michelle Marin, an industrial designer from Venice, Italy, has created —at least on paper — the human-powered snowmobile. Built of lightweight tube aluminum and standard bicycle parts, her HPSVehicle is designed to give a quiet, athletic experience for those who aren't able to get the hang of cross-country skiing. The experience will be slow, and you'll need flat, groomed snow for an optimal experiecne, she warns. Tour de Minnesota, anyone?

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photo: Courtesy Thule Group

This sleek object is a Koenigsegg Agera R, a Swedish-made, biofuel-burning beast of a sports car, built of carbon fiber and honeycomb aluminum, and capable of 1,115 horsepower in its 2.9 second trip from a dead stop to more than 60 miles per hour. That sleek object on top of the car is a Thule, a Swedish-made ski box custom made for the Agera. Because the one thing keeping you from buying a supercar is there’s just no room to stash your skis. Learn more at koenigsegg.com

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photo: Courtesy iSkin

We would never sneer at the trickledown of alpine fashion, and the myriad expressions it takes in the popular culture. Nor would we point out that quilted and stuffed nylon isn’t normally used for the padding of delicate and easily dropped items, or that it is wonderful at conserving heat such as that generated by small electronics. We would, however, point out that iSkin makes the Summit in six groovy colors, and we’re putting it on our holiday wish list. In purple. Learn more at iskin.com

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photo: Courtesy Continuum, LLC

E Ink, the technology company that produces a proprietary electronic paper, is thinking beyond the Kindle. At a recent industry trade show, the company unveiled a concept for an E Ink-enabled snowboard. Powered by a piezo-electric generator, the paper-thin display would receive and display information such as altitude, direction, and temperature, and conceivably a whole host of other relevant information, such as the rider’s Twitter feed. Soon to come: Colorado passes laws outlawing texting while shredding.

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photo: Courtesy of GearPods

Perhaps you have a first-aid bag, an emergency shelter, and a survival kit. But when was the last time you actually put them in your backpack? GearPods, an ingenious series of tubes that connect for portability and compact carry, come in individual kits prepacked with things like a bivy, a stove system, and even a (manual) chain saw. Multikit systems with names like “Backcountry” and “Survival Pro” o er grab-and-go preparedness. Empty pods are also available to pack-your-own types, and all of them connect to create something that fi ts into a standard water-bottle pocket.

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photo: Courtesy of Quickpoles

Archeologists tell us that skiing has been invented and reinvented throughout human history, but was abandoned each time because carrying both skis and poles was such a hassle. Various balancing methods — including the notorious Texas Carry — have been attempted in modern times, but Quickpoles are the first product to take a technological approach to the problem. Each pole snaps into a ski binding to create a handle, making the whole caboodle manageable with just one hand, and keeping the poles with the skis for storage and transport.

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photo: Courtesy Mercedes-Benz

When a 4x4 just won’t make it up the hill, the Mercedes-Benz Zetros 6x6 is just the lift ticket. Designed as a go-anywhere, do-anything, conquer-everything military truck, the Zetros was reimagined as a hunting and expedition vehicle — one part Snowcat and one part Aspen lodge — for a pair of Mongolian businessmen. A 7.2- liter six-cylinder diesel engine with 326 horsepower and a colossal 959 foot-pounds of torque drives all six wheels through a nine-speed manual transmission.

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photo: Courtesy of Land Rover

What Sean Connery is to British movie actors, the Land Rover Defender is to British automobiles: capable, durable, handsome, and just this side of ancient. Not too far evolved from the seminal Series I of 1948, the defiantly uncomplicated Defender is as old as the hills it has famously conquered. Enter the Land Rover DC100, a conceptual vision of the next Defender that’s everything the old warhorse is and a whole lot of what it isn’t — which is to say, modern.