Knitting Conundrum

I'm finding myself wishing that I'd bought this scarf or another one similarly constructed so that I could take it apart to figure out how it's made. It's fair isle but doesn't have floats on the back and lies flat. The stitches on the front are about 2-3 times as tall as the stitches on the back, and the stitches on the back form a sort of checkerboardish pattern. It's not a hollow tube, like you might see in typical double knitting.