Went snowboarding again today at Fortress Mountain. There was less
snow than last weekend, but the conditions were still pretty
good. Unfortunately, Fortress has only one lift open right now, and
all the runs off of it are black diamonds, unless you want to carry
your board along the ridge to a blue run. It's been a bit of a trial
by fire to learn to snowboard on black diamonds, although the green
run I did over and over again at Sunshine gave me just as much
trouble. For a different reason though.
Last week I rode a run with a lot of powder, over and over again,
just practicing my turns. I stuck to the powder for the soft landings,
since a couple of hard falls at Sunshine turned me off of groomed runs
for practicing. I hadn't quite figured out my boots, so I spent quite
a lot of time sitting around trying to get the feeling to come back in
my toes and feet. Perhaps part of that was having brand new boots. I
think I did about 4 runs last weekend... it was pretty dismal. I was
able to improve a bit though. It wasn't only my feet holding me
back... I spent a lot of time falling down and trying to get back up
again. I did a few face plants; instant brain freeze! One of the guys
I was with lent me some goggles, and that helped quite a bit, or maybe
I just didn't do any more face plants.
This week I had almost no problem doing 7 or 8 runs in a row,
before we stopped for lunch. After lunch we probably did 7 or 8 more. I think we were the last non-employees on the hill actually. I even kept up with Stephen, so he wasn't
able to get two runs to my one in. The last two times he told me a lot
of helpful stuff about balance and how to turn and so on, and drilled
me even. TURN! TURN! TURN! It was like a 60's folk song. This time
out, I knew I had to practice my turning. Particularly since the
snow wasn't as powdery and less effort was required to twist the board
around, so that balance and weight distribution played a bigger
role. So I made some progress on that. We stuck to an interesting run
under the chairlift, one with powder, little gullies, a bit of
groomed. Playing in the gullies was fun, but I had a hard time
turning from my back edge to my front edge. I finally figured out
that it was because I was too far back on the board, and I wasn't
leaning into the turn enough. It felt very strange to lean
forward. More practice is required.
The green run I was working on at Sunshine gave me a lot of
trouble because parts of it are quite long and not very steep. This
meant that I tended to want to ride along flat on the board; the
trouble is that little bumps in the snow can cause an edge to catch
and an unpleasant fall. A couple of those convinced me that I needed
a helmet, which has helped a lot. I still have to figure out how to
handle that terrain, which is probably just a matter of keeping up on
an edge at all times and move from edge to edge fairly quickly.
So far it's been a lot of fun learning to snowboard!
