I’ve been here on the mountain for four weeks now, and I’ve been on the hill for twenty of those. Twenty-one, maybe, but I’m going to round that number out. Over the last ten days, I’ve hit a little more terrain, worked on turns, rode some powder, and spent some time in the parks.

My first day out since the day 10 review, I realized I was having trouble making turns. I went to June with a friend, and right turns were just spooking me. I wasn’t making the transition from left to right turn smoothly. My board is set up goofy, but it’s fairly neutral. I frequently ride switch. Actually, I’d ride switch to give my feet, ankles, and legs a break — ie to work both legs equally. Plus, get used to riding switch. So I was having trouble transitioning heel to toe when switch, and toe to heel when regular: ie right turns. Which was weird, because it wasn’t a heel-to-toe thing, or toe-to-heel; it was right turns. Anyway, despite the fact that I had been going down blue-black slopes, I decided to return to gentler slopes and start making a bunch of right turns. It took me a couple days to figure it out.

That’s one of the fun things about snowboarding to me. It’s all balance. Lean forward, lean back, lean right or left, tilt the board, pull up on the nose, whatever. Riding well requires a good sense of your own body and it’s a feeling I really enjoy.

I want to get into park and pipe riding, so after a couple days of just making simple turns, I rode into one of the newbie parks. My first day, I just went over the rollers (a mound of snow with a fixed cross-section left to right and a rounded profile when going over it). It took be a couple days to get used to hitting the rollers straight on, and with speed.

Then we got some powder, and I spent a day riding through the trees and the ungroomed bits on the side of the trail. It was a ton of fun! I hunted for untracked paths through the trees. I rode a bit of powder before, and this wasn’t too deep (about 6 inches), so I wound up working on making turns in the powder, especially on steeper slopes. I know I’ll need more practice in steep powder, but it was great to head through the trees, dart across a trail, then back into the trees again!

Then it was back into the park. At this point, I was more comfortable going left-foot first (which would normally be called a regular stance, cept for my board being mounted goofy means that this is actually switch). So on the non-park bits, I’d ride right-foot first to get better at those turns, then back to left-foot-first for the jumps and whatnot. Terminology is confusing; I wish there was an accepted term for riding left-foot first, for riding mounted-forward-foot first, etc. Really there’s just “goofy” (board is mounted backwards) and “switch” (riding reverse to how the board is mounted), and everything else requires a lot more words…. I figure most people rarely ride switch. It’s a big deal in tricks, and evidently not something most people do much, but … meh. Anyway.

I hit the rollers for a couple days, then started hitting jumps, then got more comfortable hitting jumps at speed and getting air. I’m still not jumping much over the jump; ie pumping my legs to get a boost. There’s a couple small parks; one (Disco) has smaller jumps on a shallower slope, so easier to learn jumps. The other small park (Wonderland) is a bit steeper, and the jumps themselves are shaped a bit more aggressively. I’d usually ride one for a couple hours, head across the mountain to the other, then hit that one for a bit.

Although I’d ridden a box or two before, today was really the first day I did boxes. Still haven’t hit a rail.

View from the top

I also went back to the steeps today. It’ll take me a couple more days to really get used to it. And I also took the gondola up to the top of the mountain. It was incredibly beautiful. They have a great center in the station at the top of the mountain which points out nearby peaks and has a bit of history (both human and geologic) of the region. I peered down the slopes and… couldn’t see it. It’s not a cliff, but it’s effin steep. I got back into the gondola and rode that down.

Next weekend, I’m taking a park-and-pipe camp. Should be interesting. Before that, I’ll be working on both steeps and the park, going for rails, longer boxes, and bigger jumps. They do split the camp up according to skill level. I have a feeling it’ll be me and a bunch of 13-year-olds, but what the hell! hehe

See ya on Monday.

After ten days on the slopes here on the mountain, I’m reporting my progress and plans.

I’ve been snowboarding for eight years now. Kinda. I actually first started snowboarding eight years ago, but I only went about six times each of those first two years, only about twenty times the last time I was up at Mammoth, and just a few times outside that. I didn’t go at all last year, and I think I didn’t go any the year before that… so back during xmas week was the first time I went snowboarding in three seasons. These past ten day have been kind of like starting from scratch – minus the first couple days of falling on my ass all the time.

When I was in Colorado, I’d take a run, then take a 30-minute break (with my boots off) to recover. I stopped a dozen times during each run. I stopped for several reasons: boot pain, fitness, altitude, and leg burn. Eventually I got used to the altitude, but the other problems persisted.

The first problem I had to get over was boot pain. I eventually figured out the trick — I don’t tighten my lower boots at all. My boots have three sets of laces: one for the inner liner, one for the foot, and one for the calf. I don’t tighten the inner liner at all and leave the foot alone. I still occasionally over-tighten a boot, and usually that means I wind up taking the boot completely off and re-lace it. Larger boots would help, but with sufficiently tightened upper laces and bindings, and I don’t get a lot of foot movement inside the boot while I’m on the slopes.

Despite running up to two miles a day before I came out, I’m still not that fit. This is a combination of being overweight and unfit; snowboarding is a hefty physical activity and I’m a hefty guy. Losing weight will help, I’m sure. It’s hard to tell how much it’s helped so far, but if I continue my current losing streak (about .4 pounds a day) I should be at fighting weight… about when the season is over. Anyway, every bit helps. I’m thinking of sprinting up stairs on my days off to try to boost both leg strength and fitness.

Which brings me to my next point: leg burn. There’s a virtous cycle in snowboarding: the faster you go, the less time you spend on a run, the less you stop, the less tired you get, the less your legs burn. And the less I stop/etc, the faster I complete a run. Fatigue and leg burn build; a trip up the mountain resets that fatigue clock, allowing me to make the next run fresh. Because of this cycle of improvement, it’s hard to tell how much better my legs are doing. Plus I’m kinda working around the problem by riding switch for a few turns, then swapping again. This way I burn both legs, not just one, plus get more experience riding switch. I’m only marginally less adept at riding switch than normal and, as I’ve improved I’ve gotten better at both.

Although I’ve recently been riding blue-black slopes, I still spend most of my time on blue-green trails. “Blue-green” and “blue-black” seems to mean that the slope has characteristics of both; a blue-green is a green trail with some blue-level steepness in some parts. I’ve only ridden a true green slope once and I was surprised at how shallow it was. The steep bits on the blue-blacks aren’t too long, and are wide, too. I can handle the steeps, but not at speed.

On a few days I’ve sat in the lodge watching people come down the slopes. I’m surprised at the number of unskilled snowboarders that attempt the “true blue” slopes, slip-sliding their way down, falling every hundred feet, crouched down and bent over and arms splayed — or all of the above. I think either ego or a friend convinced them to try the more difficult slope, and I wonder if they’re getting anything out of it other than bragging rights, which to me seems stupid. I’m content riding the blue-greens, over and over. There’s tons of paths I can take so I don’t get bored of “the same trail,” especially if I venture onto nearby lifts and hit a blue-black now and then. I do fall; I fell once today, in my brief two hours of riding. I don’t like falling. I can look back at my path and figure out why I fell; lately, I’ve been working on cases where I roll from edge to edge but my board isn’t pointing straight, ie I roll onto my downhill edge while trying to link turns.

We had tons of snow last week – about 8 feet of fresh on the mountain. I wish I was a better rider, because there was tons of powder to take advantage of, especially with new snowfall every day and living local to grab it. As it was, I spent a bit of time in the powder, getting somewhat used to it. The powder-hounds tend to hit the top of the mountain, but one of the great things about Mammoth is that you can ride through the trees nearly everywhere; the trees have about the same base depth as the trails. Whereas many of the resorts out east tend to have trails that are built way up above the surrounding areas, some of the trails here are *below* the level of the surrounding snow, due to grooming packing the snow down.
As hinted at in Wednesday’s post about progression, I plan to keep riding the blue-greens until I’m much more comfortable in my turns. I need to get used to turning when I don’t have an easy, perfectly straight downhill path, ie when a turn might not put me perfectly across the fall line. I’ll hit the blue-blacks on occasion, to add variety and to test out my tolerance for steepness. I also plan on hitting rollers, a few rails, and maybe the eighth-pipe set up in Disco park.

See y’all next week, enjoy your weekend. I’m spending tomorrow morning watching the local Gatorade amateur event, and planning on going to June on Sunday.