First Snowboarding Turns: Feel the Cold

Which is better: late-season riding or early-season riding? I’ll take late season, please.

Early season riding has this advantage: It satisfies an urge that has been unsatisfied for months. On the other hand, at the start of the season you’ll get a lot of rocks and closed trails. At the end of the season, by contrast, you get warm, sunny days, hero snow, and few crowds. What’s not to like?

Never mind about the limits of early-season riding, I went last weekend anyway. (Whether it can be called “early” is another question!)

A significant number of runs were closed for snowmaking. It’s hard to fault that, but still, disappointing. I just checked the snow report for today, and they still have 10 trails closed. I suspect that many of those are my favorites.

So how was the first outing? It was good to be out on my board, finally. I still know how to make turns (hooray!), and I felt little of the uneasiness that I felt on my first day of the season on skis.

The air temperature was pretty low, so I ducked inside several times, partly to warm up and partly just to savor being back on the slopes.

Even the cold has its value. Hypothermia is certainly something to be concerned about when you are outside in the winter, but long before you reach that point, there’s a certain invigorating quality to the cold. I get a sense of “I can’t believe I’m out here–and thriving in it. Woo hoo!”

So there’s some value to early-season riding after all.