Mountain biking: Compare and contrast with snowboarding

One thing I like about learning a new activity (e.g., mountain biking) is that it helps me put an old one (e.g., snowboarding) into perspective. Here are some advantages of mountain biking:

1. You don’t have to pay anything to go riding. (Note: You may have to pay a fee if you go biking on a private land, or if you park your car in a public park.) Unless you practice back-country snowboarding, you’ll probably buy a lift ticket.
2. Unless you’re a hard-core biker who goes out in winter, you don’t have to worry about frostbite.
3. You can wear your normal shoes rather than get into specialized footwear. (Granted, some people do buy specialized biking shoes.)

And here are some advantages of snowboarding:

1. You don’t have to worry about ticks.
2. You have much more freedom of movement down a slope than you do on a single track.
3. You can go at your own pace, and not worry about keeping ahead of the people behind you.  (The need to keep pace is a challenge that I face in another summer activity, golf.)
4. In biking, a trail may be closed because it rained the day before–or the day before that. There is seldom a comparative event in snowboarding, unless it’s a really big storm that prevents you from driving to the mountain to begin with.

Here are some ways that they’re similar:

1. You can get hurt on even the easiest terrain.
2. They can both be a rush.
3. You can spend a lot of money–or not much.
4. The terrain (if you’re riding on  maintained bike trail) can be closed in both sports for maintenance.
5. You can progress from a novice to an expert by taking on more difficult terrain, attempting tricks, and so forth.
6. Equipment can make a big difference. For example, a snowboard can be too stiff or too soft for a given purpose. In biking, I noticed a huge difference in the performance of a street bike (which I took to the same trail about a month ago) and the mountain bike.

And here are some more differences:

1. Even on the novice trail that I rode, I was much closer to the trees than I usually get on a snowboard.
2. Another difference, I suspect, is that you can be much more of a gear-head–and perhaps need to be–in mountain biking.  Whether or not that’s a good thing depends on your interest in and aptitude for fiddling with stuff.