PREPARING FOR SNOW IN THE SKI-FREE ZONE

TELL me: In what ski store, anywhere in the country, could you buy a
bag that is specially designed to hide your drugs?

This is perhaps the most striking difference between skiing and
snowboarding, two sports so culturally opposed that the only thing
they share is a winter slope. Ski stores sell expensive Austrian
sweaters with snowflake designs. In the new Burton store, you can buy
a kit bag for your marijuana. You can also buy a jacket into which you
can plug an iPod, a purse for one-night stands and a knapsack that
doubles as a traveling bar, complete with martini shaker.

Skiing: stodgy. Snowboarding: irreverent. Get it?

Burton is the country's, perhaps the world's, best-known brand of
snowboarding equipment and clothing. The founder, Jake Burton, started
making snowboards in the 1980's using steam-bent wood and fiberglass,
and a movement was born.

The 4,600-square-foot flagship in SoHo, which opened last month,
carries performance goods from all of Burton's brands, which now
include not only Burton snowboards but also a dizzying number of other
lines that manufacture eyewear, T-shirts and sneakers, like R.E.D.,
Anon Optics, Gravis, Mark XIII and Analog.

The new store is the brand's fourth retail location. Others are in
Burlington, Vt., Burton's corporate home, and Innsbruck, Austria. The
company also operates a sneaker store in Tokyo.

With its high ceilings and slate floors, the Burton store is designed
to look like a winter lodge. But the 12-foot-tall yeti at the front
door, made entirely out of shredded Burton catalogs, assures that you
are elsewhere. The place is cleverly designed. Early snowboards are
fixed beneath glass flooring, so aspirational boarders can stand on
top of them and pretend they are shredding the mountain atop a 1985
Backhill model.

At the rear of the store is the "cold room," a walk-in refrigerator
cooled to 15 degrees, supposedly for shoppers to test the gear in
simulated cold weather. Practically speaking it's a gimmick; truly to
test the clothes, you would need wind and snow and movement. But with
its ice blocks and deer head on the wall, it's amusing.

A cheerful salesclerk from Twin Falls, Idaho, took me around the
place, showing me some of the niftier items, like the multimedia
jacket, manufactured with Motorola, into which boarders can plug their
Bluetooth-enabled mobile phone and iPod. (It will be available in
December.) There is even a screen on the sleeve with caller ID.

"Say you're listening to your music, and the phone rings," she said.
"You just push a button on your sleeve and say, 'Hey, dude, can't talk
right now, I'm about to get a great hit.' But of course that's
sacrilegious."

Sacrilegious?

"Yeah, because you so totally shouldn't be answering your phone on top
of the mountain," she said.

Well, yeah. I like a store with a staff that isn't so intoxicated by
the corporate bottom line that it can't tell you what items are so
totally inane.

The showroom's center is devoted to boards of all sizes, decorated
with skulls, flowers, rainbows, lions, cartoon characters. The Vapor
is this year's in-demand model, and it sells for $899.99, but most
boards cost less. Snowboarding fashion is loose-fitting and slouchy,
and at Burton falls into categories like Alpine Lodge, 80's Prep,
Rockabilly, Ecopop and Tartan Royalty.

I liked the Swiss Miss hooded sweater ($79.95), and I could definitely
picture my husband in head-to-toe Plamo, a Burton pattern that
combines plaid and camouflage. (He is to Burton boards what Carrie
Bradshaw is to shoes; the guy has owned more than 15.)

And then there are the goodies. After all, the Burton store doesn't
just sell pieces of fiberglass. It sells a template for life, listed
manifesto style on the front door. "Dogs welcome," it reads. "No work
on a powder day. Ski-free zone. Will you still be riding when it is no
longer cool?"

It has to sell a culture; it's 60 miles away from the nearest
slopes.

So it has the Liquid Lounger, a knapsack with speakers, which also
folds out into a chair. Inside are a knife, dice and a miniature
martini shaker. (It's $129.95.) The Burton Hook-Up Kit, for $24.95, is
a handbag that stocks various items to get a woman out the door
comfortably after an overnight interlude; it includes, among other
items, a toothbrush and thong underwear.

Then there's the discreet zippered pouch called the Burton 420 Kit,
for $20. The number 420, another salesclerk told me, refers to police
lingo for a drug bust in progress. Inside the pouch is a compartment
for one's stash and a pocket for a lighter. In reality there is no 420
police code, but the number is used in teenage lingo to indicate that
one is in possession of marijuana, or that one approves of marijuana.

The 420 Kit is disturbing. We have reached a point at which marijuana
use is so thoroughly accepted in certain quarters that the country's
most popular snowboard chain actually sells an item that is intended
to make pot-smoking easier. Or at least better outfitted.

Bryan Johnston, the company's global vice president for marketing,
explained that the 420 Kit was created as a practical watertight
container for any on-the-hill use. "The name of the kit is meant to be
tongue in cheek," he said.

I love the larger ideas at Burton. I admire precise athletic equipment
and terrific outdoor gear, and as I watched scenes of snowboarders
floating across enormous mountains on a huge screen in the store, I
felt utterly heartsick not to be anywhere near a mountain. But I hate
the idea that some kid might walk out of Burton with a 420 Kit in his
shopping bag and think it's part and parcel with the sport of
snowboarding.

Burton

106 Spring Street (at Mercer Street),

Manhattan; (212) 966-8068

ATMOSPHERE High-tech ski lodge meets SoHo art gallery.

SERVICE Good.

KEY LOOKS Winter jackets Johnny Rotten would feel comfortable in.
Plamo, Burton's trademark pattern, which combines plaid and camouflage.

PRICES Snowboards, $300 to $900; jackets, $100 to $350; insulated
pants, $100 to $200.