Terrain Parks and Snowboarders are Not Synonymous

If you read a newspaper article, book chapter or other publication describing a place where people go skiing and snowboarding, commonly known as a ski area, you're likely to find a mistake.

Here's an excerpt from an article published in the Daily Herald, a newspaper published in the suburbs of Chicago.

Stats: Five slopes: two beginner, two intermediate (includes terrain for snowboarders), one advanced; around-the-clock snow-making capability and a routine grooming schedule to ensure best possible conditions.

Did you catch the error? It's partly obscured, so let me call it out for you: terrain parks are for snowboarders, and the natural place for snowboarders is in a terrain park.

It is true that for many snowboarders, their snowboarding experience is largely confined to hitting the features in a terrain park. But not all snowboarders spend most of their time there. Nor is snowboarding defined exclusively by what happens in the terrain park. There's also alpine carving and, for lack of a better word, freeriding, which is what you might simply call "snowboarding."

In addition, not all terrain park users are snowboarders. Thanks to the development of twin-tip skis, terrain parks are increasingly popular with skiers.

So confining snowboarders to the terrain park is a disservice to both snowboarders and skiers.

My own freestyle experience is limited to doing a 50/50 boardslide down a funbox or making some turns in a halfpipe. My impression is that most snowboarders over 40 spend most of their time outside of the park, too.

Agree? Disagree? Leave a comment.

Big Air, Big Airbags

For the uninitiated, snowboarding is all about freestyle moves, being 10 feet or more off the ground, whether that comes about through soaring out of the halfpipe or hurling one's self off a kicker, or ramp.

There's certainly more to snowboarding than that, such as riding on groomed slopes, in powder, or in other ways that generally involved keeping some part of the board on the ground.

Still, the possibility of getting "big air" makes for a good story, as Sean Newsom wrote last year in the Times of London. His article was called Leaping the Fear Barrier."

In the article, Newsom writes about jumping off a ramp onto a couple of giant air bags, which absorb the impact of poorly executed jumps--in other words, jumps such as he was likely to perform.

First, he describes the airbags:

I could only hope that the socking great airbag on the other side of the jump would stop my fall. This giant inflatable cushion is becoming a regular fixture in the UK’s "real snow" centres (which use man-made snow, very close to the real thing). The airbag contains two air-filled chambers. The first, lower chamber is similar to a bouncy castle. The second, top layer is softer, full of blown air, and is designed to soak up the impact of the fall rather than provide any bounce.

Then he calculates what will happen, and makes the jump.

A split second later, I was down on the airbag. It was an extraordinary feeling. There was almost no sense of impact. It soaked up the full force of my fall, and left me lying in the middle of an enormous and rather gorgeous pillow, quivering with laughter and relief. My system hasn’t been so flooded with adrenaline since the time I first learnt to ride a snowboard.

It's almost enough to make me think of trying out something like that.

You Can Watch It, But Can You Describe It?

My freestyle ability is, to put it politely, limited. I add something new every so often, but mostly I like cruising on the mountain. That doesn't mean that I can't enjoy watching a freestyle competition.

On the other hand, I can't necessarily describe all that goes on. Take, for example, a recent story from Ski Press. It was about the results of the U.S. Open. The snowboarding one, not the golf one.

On the men's side, the winner of the slopestyle event was Travis Rice. What did he do to win? He executed "a frontside boardslide on the first rail to a backside 720 Japan air, frontside 720 melon grab, backside rodeo 720 nosegrab, switch backside 180 and a front boardslide to 270 off on the final rail."

Got that?

In the women's competition, Jamie Anderson's triumphant run include "a frontside 180 indy grab, Cab 540, frontside 360, method air and a nose press to tail press on the last rail."

I almost understand what happened there.

To be fair, this isn't one of those "Those darn kids" rants. Every sporting activity has its terminology. A fan of U.S. football, for example, will have no problem telling you the difference between a post pattern, a corner route, and a corner blitz. Actually, Ski Press did a good job of describing, for those who can unlock the language, just what happened.

Complete Your Turns

I gave a lesson today, to a young guy I'll call Robert. He told me that he has taken a snowboard out "in my backyard" a few times, though I wasn't sure what that went.

We went through the preliminary stuff, and then moved over to the bunny hill. He had a natural inclination to make toeside turns. But heelside turns? Those were another matter. I gave him some ideas on how to initiative and stick with a heelside turn, but he just couldn't do it.

That's not unusual; many new riders favor toeside turns. For one thing, you can see where you are going more easily. And it's more like the natural motion of walking forward, in a circle. Going heelside can feel like walking backwards.

Sometime after his lesson, another instructor came up to me and said "Did you have the kid in the blue jacket this morning?"

"Yes, I think so."

"Well you should up to the top of the bunny hill. He's doing some great jumps!"

And sure enough, he was doing jumps. Some boys had built a small kicker, and a lot of riders (all under 15, I would guess) took turns "getting air," anywhere from 2 inches to 4 feet.

"Hey, I hear you're doing some great stuff up here," I said to Robert after I arrived in the area.

"Should I do a 180 or a nose grab?," he asked.

"How about a 180? I like the way those look," I said.

He did a tail grab instead. Oh well, it was still enjoyable to watch.

I ended up making a few jumps too. Nothing major, but enough to participate.

I was glad that Robert was able to get in some enjoyment from making those jumps. Now if he could just get those heelside turns worked out.

His experience made me wonder: is it possible to become a serious (enough for a small ski hill) freestyle rider without being able to link turns?

More Boxes!

This might have been my last day of local riding. The conditions were slick in the morning, and soft by afternoon.

In the morning I went back to the little terrain park trail. It has a few jumps, a small rail, a pipe, and a flat rectangular box. Last week I tried going over the box, and only once had a clean landing. Today I had three in a row. I won't qualify for the U.S. Slopestyle Open anytime soon, but hey, it's progress.

The key to going over a box--or at least what I had to work on--is to stand with bent knees, but no bend in the waist. Bending over could make you slide off the box entirely before you really want to and it could also give you an awkward landing.

Check some speed before you slide onto the box, be centered from tip to tail, heel to toe, slide on and then off. A little mental trick somebody told me is to imagine that you have a flashlight on your belt buckle. Don't point it into the sky, or at the ground. Just straight out.

As for the landing, I have had no trouble sticking the landing as long as I have good form on the box itself.

A Big Box O'Fun

My freestyle repertoire is rather small. But recently, I added to it.

I've had my eye on trying some boxes. These are rectangular items in the snow, in a terrain park, upon which you slide on and then off.

There are three things that scare me away. One is how to get on the box. Often, there's a small ramp of snow up to the start of the box, except that the ramp may have a gap, so that you have to do a little jump onto the box.

The second concern is what to do on the box. Will I fall off? If so, will that hurt?

The third concern is how to leave the box when the time comes. Will the drop-off be too far? Will I land improperly and thus fall?

Well, I was going through a terrain park of small features, and saw the perfect box. It was low to the ground. There was no huge drop-off at the end, and it seemed to be nearly flush with the snow at the beginning.

The most enticing part of the feature? This wasn't just a standard box, which is perhaps a foot wide. This box was the size of a small car.

Not exactly, but it was about 4 feet wide. So in other words, slide on, and there's no chance that you're going to slide off to the side. Navigating this feature would require getting on the box and simply keeping the same pose: look forward; don't bend at the waist; and bend at the knees. With that huge margin of error, I could do that.

So on a second look at the box, I get closer scrub off some speed. Then I do my best freestyle competition imitation, and head straight down the fall line, onto the box.

I slide on. I slide off. Yipee!

It's nothing great in the history of freestyle, but it's enjoyable and encouraging to add a few new skills to the toolbox.

Maybe the soft snow of Spring will invite further experimentation.

A Powder Morning in the (City) Park

So we finally got a powder day. And all I got is crud.

People who don't live in Minnesota think that because it's cold here, we must get a lot of snow.

Not true.

Unlike western Michigan, Cleveland, or Buffalo and western New York state, we don't have one of the Great Lakes off to the west. Hence, the air that comes from the west is usually dry, which is not a really good thing if you would like to see a lot of snow.

In addition, when snow does fall here, it doesn't stay powder very long. Most skiers and riders aren't used to it, and since it's not regularly replenished, it turns to crud, and eventually bumps, very quickly. (One "horror" I witnessed: riding on a layer of "dust on crust," what usually passes for powder here, while watching a groomer work the other side of the hill, taking out all the powder before it was even tracked out!)

But yesterday, I woke up to 9 or 10 inches of snow in the driveway. As I shoveled out, I was listening to a podcast, during which someone estimated that thanks to labor-saving devices, the modern American has the equivalent of 300 servants at his disposal.

A few minutes after that, my next-door neighbor came over with his snow blower (!) and cleared out the three-quarters of the driveway that was left.

Unsure of the road conditions so early in the day, I walked over to a local park, and earned some runs through walking up the hill. The experience brought back some elements of childhood, to be sure, but not exactly the thrill. The hill should have been steeper for the amount of snow on the ground. I had always wondered what it would be like to take some runs on that space, in powder. I got the chance, which isn't to say that it's worth doing again.

One thing that might be worth repeating is building a kicker. I see kids building kickers are ski areas all that time, but the snow there is usually so hard that going off them is not appealing.

But today ... in that soft stuff. Why not?

One key word in snowboarding is "progression," which means little-by-little, taking on bigger challenges. I started out with a very small kicker, and ended up with ... a small kicker, perhaps 18 inches tall. Slide down to the kicker, jump off, ride out, walk up, add to the kicker, walk up some more, and then repeat.

Eventually I got to perhaps 2 feet in the air, though even that might be an overly generous estimate. What I lacked in altitude I made up for in style. Not "stylish," but merely good form. I find myself bending at that waist whenever I get the slightest air, and of course, that's bad news. Bad because it puts me in a position to fall. But on the descents over the kicker, I managed to bend my knees, not my waist, and I had a good jump every time.

Now if I just had plenty of powder to try this again and again.

It's unlikely that I'll get very good at jumps, though. If I ever had that much snow to play with, it would probably happen only on a big mountain. And in that case, playing around with a kicker would be a waste of time. I'd be cruising, taking in the acreage and thousands of feet of vertical descent.

Halfpipe Clinic

My how far I've come. Today I took part in a halfpipe clinic. Not that I'm pulling switch rodeo 720 McTwists or anything like that. But I am making tentative steps towards learning a few things about it.

One thing I learned today is that not all pipes are created equal. The very term "pipe" isn't quite correct. It suggests a semi-circle, with a round bottom. If, on the other hand, you look at a pipe used by the top competitors, it's a bit squashed, with a flat bottom of, I'm guessing here, at least 12 feet wide before the transition to the wall kicks in.

The pipe I was looking at today is a lot more rounded than that, which makes it a less than spectacular one. At least for those who know what they are doing.

But here are a couple of thoughts I came across during the clinic, things that might apply to beginners:

- It really shouldn't matter whether the walls are icy or not. Why? When you're going up the wall, your board should be flat on the wall. In other words, no edge.

- Going up the wall, at some point you body ought to be perpendicular to the wall. That means your body ought to be parallel to the flat bottom of the pipe. Yikes! Trying to keep your body upright as you go up the wall only causes problems.

- Compress your legs as you enter from the flat to the transition, but then extend as you go from the transition to the flat. Doing this give you added stability, just as extension while finishing a carving turn adds stability.

In the halfpipe

I rode a little halfpipe the other day. No, it wasn't anything spectacular, and it may even have been not up to form. But progression is progression.

The first pipe is natural, shallow, and short. It's perhaps 3 feet tall from the deepest part of the pipe, and half the width of a conventional pipe. I took this twice.

The second pipe is a monster. It's at least 9 feet tall (maybe 12 feet), 15 feet wide, and I don't know how long.

A fellow I met on the lift suggested I simply ride down the middle, and look at it. I did, and was amazed.

The second time through I played off the sides just a little bit. Emphasize "little." My trips up the "wall" were at the most two feet. I was afraid of getting up too much speed--and falling too far down into the transition area--to get up any higher. The key to learning the halfpipe, like anything else in riding, is one step at a time.

In the Pipe But Not Of It

I made my first trip to the halfpipe today. My goal was simply to get an idea of what it was like in there, and the results weren't pretty.

Actually, there were two pipes available, and I took the mini one. It's barely wider than a ditch alongside a country road, and not as deep.

My goal heading out was simply to spend most of the time in the middle, with an occasional foray towards the side. But once I got heading towards one side, the whole design of the pipe pushed me from one side to the other. (Duh!)

Perhaps I actually once rode once from one side of the pipe to the other without falling. But I doubt it. Of course, having my bindings set for cruising and not the park probably didn't help. Neither did trying to make (I suspect) tighter turns than were warranted.

So you could say that I've been in the pipe, but I'm not a creature of it. For some reason, I think hitting some modest features such as a funbox or a small kicker might be easier.