Green is the New Blue

Say you’re with some people who are just starting out in snowboarding, they need some time to practice on easy slopes, and you want to hang out with them. What can you do to make the time more interesting if you’re a more advanced rider?

Here are some things that you can do to make a slope that might be so as to be uninteresting more challenging:

Keep one foot out.
Ride down the hill with only your front foot in the binding. This reinforces the idea that your front foot should be doing the steering. You should find it difficult. If you find it extremely difficult, it may mean that you’re kicking out your back foot to make turns—a move that will make for skidded turns.

Make your turns smaller and smaller.
Start out by using the lift towers as objects to slalom around. Then move to somewhere else on the slope and start making your turns successively shorter so that you’re nearly going with the fall line. (Start out saying “1, 2, 3, 4, turn,” and then “1, 2, 3, turn.”) Be careful to time when do this, as it will mean that you’ll reach the chair much sooner than your friends who are beginners.

Practice filming other people.
Keeping your eye on a moving target while you are moving yourself is a challenge!

Point your board in the other direction.
Your board has a tip, which is first part of the board to start a turn, and a tail, which is the last. Don’t do anything different with your bindings, but start looking towards the tail of your board as you slide, so that it, not the tip, leads you down the hill. This will be a challenge for many people. If you have a directional board, you’ll have the extra challenging of having a smaller turning radius.

Flip your bindings 180 degrees from where they are now.
Keep using the tip of the board to lead you down the hill. But take your bindings off the board and flip them around so that your toes will point in the opposite direction (along the length of the board) of what they’re used to. Like the previous activity, this means that you’ll have a different lead foot than what you’re used to. It’s just a bit more complicated in that you’ve got to go to the trouble of remounting your bindings.

If you ride a symmetrical twin-tip board and use a stance of zero-zero degrees, there’s no distinction between these two “tricks.” Otherwise, the differences between the two can range from subtle to dramatic, depending on the sidecut of the board, binding angles, and how far the bindings are set from the tip of the board.

Get small.
Ride on an ultra-short snowboard, such as the Rossignol Mini. It will give you a different feel than your regular board, and make it easier to perform some of the other items on this list.

Spin.
There are lots of spins, including those down by riders who launch themselves into the air and make two or three complete revolutions, five or fifteen feet in the air. You’re not interest in that? That’s OK; few older folks will be. Keep it on the ground and you’ll have enough of a challenge. As you go into a turn, keep turning so that you make a complete revolution. Once you get that down, string several spins together. You’ll probably find that it’s easier to do this by looking into the spin (frontside spin) or backing into the spin (backside spin). Perfect one and then try the other.

A new way off the lift.
Ride off the lift with your “open” binding leading the way. This will make getting off the chair lift more interesting.

Do movement analysis.
That’s the technical term for watching other people on the hill, observing what they are doing, and deciphering how what they do with their knees, ankles, shoulders, etc. affects their riding. You can pick up some good “Don’t do that” tips this way. For example, if a man has his arms spread wide and in front of him, like an outrigger, what does that tell you?

Teach your friends, if you have training to do so.
During a couple of seasons I taught through a ski school. On occasions I teach friends free of charge. But teaching is more difficult than it first appears. Make sure you have proper training, or you could help your friends develop bad habits.

Naturally, you should attempt any of these only if you have adequate space and customer traffic allows. Remember the responsibility code.