The Wild Bunch : Snowboards Now Tempt Not Just Snow Brats, but Grown-Ups, Too

It was precisely the sort of terrorism that yuppie traditionalists in their perfectly matched ski pants and parkas had predicted.

A kindly 66-year-old ski instructor had his 5- and 6-year-old students spread out on a gentle slope for lessons when a figure suddenly appeared on the hill above, plummeting like one of Lucifer’s fallen henchmen on a contraption that looked like an elongated skateboard.

Before the instructor could react, the adolescent aggressor--no doubt decked out in a black jumpsuit trimmed with fluorescent orange and pink, no doubt splitting his eardrums with some hyper-manic heavy-metal music--slashed through the group. Kicking up rooster tails of stinging snow, he used the wobbly little children as slalom poles.

With scenes like that in mind, more than 500 of the 550 or so ski resorts nationwide banned snowboarders from their slopes as recently as 1985.

Who needed them?

The hills were already crowded with skiers, who at least knew something about proper decorum and proper attire. Snowboarders, on the other hand, tended to come from surfing, where the jam-packed waves produced an angry shred-or-be-shredded world view. Or from skateboarding, a sport whose repeated head-meets-concrete encounters generate a similarly rabid mind-set.

One snowboarding magazine offers a regular feature in which young riders are depicted on their boards, madly jumping up and down on their beds.

Last year, Alpine Meadows, near Lake Tahoe, polled its season-pass holders about whether snowboarders should be allowed on the slopes. “No way!” they responded.

“The image that snowboarders have earned for themselves is one of being pretty rad and gnarly dudes,” a spokesman there explained. “Apparently that’s not what our skiers want to see here.”

Abruptly, though, Alpine has found itself in a minority. A major change in thinking is afoot, and, by all indications, this will be the pivotal season when snowboarding finally transcends its outlaw image to become a bona fide winter sport.

Four years ago, Mountain High in Wrightwood became the first Southern California resort to let snowboarders on its lifts. Now a spokesman there is rapturous in his appraisal of the breed once seen as obnoxious board brats: “We love these kids! . . . Love their attitudes! They’re all beautiful people to us!”

Why the change?

Don Carothers, director of Snow Valley’s ski patrol, summed up the decision at his resort: “Because they’re worth $33 a head.”

By most accounts, the growth curve for skiing in recent years has been as flat as a cross-country track. So resort owners lent an ear when the 65 or so companies that produce snowboards and boarding equipment and clothing began cajoling them to take another look at the odd dudes in the Day-Glo jumpsuits loitering outside their gates.

“We were pleading with them for a chance,” says Jake Burton, the owner of Burton Snowboards of Vermont. Burton is one of several people who, inspired by a ‘60s snow toy called the Snurfer, started designing and riding snowboards more than a decade ago.

As a result of lobbying by snowboarders, the United Ski Industries Assn. estimates that about 400,000 people--including increasing numbers of women--will fork over the $25-$35 price of a lift ticket to slide down resorts’ slopes on boards this year.

Moreover, only 20% of those boarders have migrated to the new sport from the ranks of the 15 million people already on skis--i.e., they’re new customers.

Which may explain why Alpine Meadows is the only major resort in the Tahoe area to ban boarders; why Mammoth Mountain decided to let them in this year; why Aspen and Keystone are the only holdouts among 27 resorts represented by Ski Country USA in Colorado, and why every major local resort is wooing them.

In fact, more than 400 resorts nationwide admitted boarders last year; the number jumped again this season, the ski industries association says. The Professional Ski Instructors of America also just began certifying instructors, and many resorts now rent boards.

None of which means that the clash between the boarding and skiing cultures is over.

Two hundred or so ski instructors at Snow Summit, near Big Bear, booed and hissed at a preseason meeting when it was announced that the resort would begin offering instruction and rentals of snow boards this year.

But even Frank Kilduff, the instructor there whose class was disrupted by the slaloming snowboarder, concedes that most boarders aren’t a problem: “They’re mostly pretty decent. There are far more aggressive, uncaring skiers than snowboarders as far as I’m concerned.”

At Summit, more and more of the instructors are giving boarding a try; a few openly prefer it to skiing.

The same thing seems to be happening with other skiers--including older skiers--who watch snowboarders carving tight turns down the slopes or launching themselves into the air off jumps and think it looks like fun.

There’s even a slogan, probably planted by board industry lobbyists: “Bored skiers snowboard.”

The transition, however, isn’t as easy as it looks.

Taking a neophyte boarder out for instructions on a recent morning, Lee Rogers, the 27-year-old director of Snow Summit’s new snowboarding program, explained some of the similarities to other sports.

It’s a lot like surfing, he explains, in that you shift your weight on a moving board to make turns. It’s a lot like skateboarding, because you’re making those turns on a stable surface rather than a moving wave. And the way you dig the board’s metal edges in to get a grip on the snow and reduce speed or stop makes it a lot like skiing.

Except, as the neophyte discovers the moment he stomps his standard-issue Sorel snow boots into the fixed bindings on the board--promptly toppling onto the seat of his woefully under-padded ski pants--it’s also a whole lot different from any of these sports.

The first thing a new boarder learns is how to scoot around on the snow without ski poles. Boarders either ride normally, with the right foot back, or “goofy foot,” with the left foot on the rear of the board. To get on a lift, the rider unstraps his rear foot and uses it to push forward. Because the front foot is still strapped to the slippery board at almost a 90-degree angle, grace does not come quickly.

Once up the hill, both of a boarder’s feet remain immobilized in the bindings at all times.

Lee demonstrates the proper stance. His toes point almost perpendicular to the board but his torso is twisted to face straight ahead. Leaning forward on his front foot--the pivot point--he raises his arms in front of him like a boxer, and shoves off, turning one way by kicking the heel of his rear foot, turning another by kicking forward with the toe.

According to loosely compiled statistics, injury rates are about the same for skiing as for boarding, but the types of injuries are different.

Any neophyte boarder finds out why. Falls are frequent. But when a boarder crashes, his feet remain stuck on the board--so the knees, most often hurt in skiing, get off easy.

A falling boarder, however, naturally tries to break his fall; wrists naturally tend to get sprained or broken in the process.

Still, Rogers and other instructors estimate that while snowboarding is sometimes bruising and exhausting at first, snowboarders often get really good at their sport more quickly than skiers.

And when they get good, they get hooked, Rogers said.

Like an increasing number of other resorts, Snow Summit has tried to attract boarders by building something called a half-pipe near the top of one run. Carved from the hillside, and pointing down the mountain toward Big Bear Lake, it looks like a cross-section of a cylinder.

Serenaded by unintelligible heavy-metal lyrics blaring from nearby lift towers, young boarders who got their start in surfing or skateboarding congregate here, kicking back in the snow, watching as their compatriots drop down the tube, whip their boards up one side, cross over and rip up the other, cranking out handstands and somersaults and blasting themselves airborne in impossible moves with improbable names: cottage cheese plants, bone-airs, method airs, slobs.

Back in line, the “pipe dogs” jabber adrenaline-injected descriptions of their exploits: “Did you see that, it was sonar! It was tonar!” (“So gnarly! Totally gnarly!”)

For the most part, older riders taking up snowboarding eschew acrobatics in favor of a less frenetic style of carving down the slopes. But they’re no less prone to poetics in their apres-snowboard discussions.

Snowboarding, said Aaron Kirsch, a 25-year-old from Carlsbad, has “a lot more artistry in it, a lot more coordination of body flow.” Scanning the bar at Snow Summit, where a handful of snowboarders mingled with the skiers, he added: “I’ll never step onto skis again. Never.”

Other “riders” said they dreamed about snowboarding after first taking it up and described the almost unreal “floating” sensation of surfing down a steep mountainside of deep powder.

Doug Pfeiffer, a 62-year-old instructor at Summit and a member of the National Ski Hall of Fame, is among a growing number of skiers who are unwilling to surrender this young sport to the young.

“Skiing used to be the only dance there was,” he said later. But snowboarding offers “a different dance on snow.” He finds the sensations addicting: “The movements are thrilling.

“I’m no pipe dog. I find that too bruising. Cruising is my game,” he said. But still, he enjoys the camaraderie that comes with being a minority participant in a budding sport. He said he kind of digs the way the tonar young shredders shout at him while he’s carving down a slope.

“Dude! Dude! That’s cool, dude!”