SNOWBOARDING: Catch a wave down the mountain

By Gavin Ehringer, Special to the Rocky

Published April 7, 2008 at 7 p.m.

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Lately I've been taking Latin dance lessons. One thing you learn, in addition to the basic steps of salsa, merengue and rhumba, is that subtle changes in the way you move and the way you hold your body make the difference between looking suave and looking like a total dork.

The key is often subtlety itself. Instead of swinging your hips from side to side, as many people do when they try Latin dance, the truly adept and graceful dancer simply pumps the knees back and forth while pushing the feet to the floor. The hip action is a byproduct of this motion, and it looks cool.

Style in snowboarding is similar. It's all about subtlety. For years I was held back due to my surfing and skateboarding background. In surfing, you reach up and behind your head to help you feel the water and the breaking of the wave. This helps you to position yourself near the peak but keeps you from getting so deep that the lip of the breaking wave hits you on the head. So, it's functional and it looks good.

But on the snow, it has the opposite effect. I saw some videos of my riding style, and I have to admit I looked like a dork.

By throwing the arm high and extending the body like that, one tends to overcorrect and turn with too much force. So I was always battling my upper body coming out of turns and especially in the bumps, where subtle changes of direction are necessary.

It took me nearly two seasons to unlearn this bad habit. I did it by putting my hands behind my back for a while and gradually moving my fingers down to the side seams of my riding pants and keeping them glued to my sides, as if they were anchored by Velcro.

In general, the ideal of snowboarding style is to keep the upper body as quiet as possible while letting the lower body do the work in the turns. One thing I often see riders do is bend too much from the waist. This, too, looks bad, and it's a difficult posture to use in riding. A more correct and comfortable posture, one that's stable and looks good, is bending from the knees and the ankles.

Imagine sitting in a chair, not quite all the way down, but approaching a sitting position. This is the ideal posture for the backside turn in snowboarding. The arms should be relaxed at the sides, with the eyes fixed in the direction you plan to go.

When you use your arms to correct turn position and balance, you end up flailing and losing the smoothness that's essential to good snowboarding style. Worse still is to bend from the waist, which forces you to hang your arms in front of you for counterbalance. Riders who do this end up looking like gorillas.

I consider myself fortunate to have a surfing and skating background. The disciplines of board sports help with finding creative new lines and ways of looking at the mountain. Many snowboarders, including pros I've ridden with, just bomb a run down the fall line. They fail to consider all the possibilities a run has to offer. Surfers and skaters, on the other hand, often look at the big picture.

A skater, for instance, soon grows bored with riding the same terrain park or city sidewalk and starts to consider all the things he can do to break up the monotony. This is a big reason that much of the park-riding energy so pervasive in today's snowboarding originated in California. The skaters brought their unique perspective to the mountains.

Similarly, surfers look for certain "lines" down a slope besides the easy-to-read fall lines. I once surfed with Strider Wasilewski, a pro surfer on the Quiksilver team. He wasn't a great snowboarder, but his approach to riding was an epiphany. He'd dart off the fall line to carve a basin wall and then drop into the trough and cross over to the other side. He was all over the mountain, linking his turns through a wide variety of double-fall-line snow humps or simply turning off the trail to find some little feature where he could blast a turn.

I, too, try to ride the hill as if it's a giant wave, looking to put dynamics into my turns and find interesting terrain, such as the banks that often line cat trails, to get more of a surfing feel out of the snowboarding experience.

Open your mind to the possibilities and you'll find that there are lots of more interesting ways to get down the mountain than simply pointing your board and following the herd to the bottom.

Gavin Ehringer has covered snowboarding for the Rocky Mountain News for 15 years.

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