My Top ten reasons not to use poles:

1. Poles are way too freaking expensive
2. All they do is get in the way
3. No poling increases balance and stability
4. Makes double grabs and sick ass handplants do-able
5. Poles bend and break frequently, forcing the user to either replace or fix them
6. Landing hard on a pole sucks
7. For all the newschoolers out there, how do you do a pole plant riding switch?
8. The Hand Drag, central to many extreme sports including surfing, skimboarding, and snowboarding, skiing pow with no poles is sick and more fun
9. If more people didn’t use poles, we would all learn better edge control, we would have to in order to keep speed up, why do beginning skiers not use poles, to teach them better edge control
10. Frees up your hands, instead of sitting on a pair of freezing metal sticks on the lift, you can more easily grab that Clif Bar in you pocket and charge harder, longer