Warming Up to Snowboard Fun : Falling, crawling and struggling to get up are prerequisites to mastering the growing slope craze.

You’re up on the mountain, where sunshine bastes a porcelain blue sky and skiers frolic on snowy slopes edged with pine. But it is gone in an instant, replaced by a blanket of white that fills your nostrils, numbs your lips, cups your ears, crawls down the back of your neck and obliterates your vision.

Winter sport enthusiasts have a term for this sudden ocular alteration.

“Nice face plant!” hoots a nearby skier.

This is not the first time the ground has roared up to meet your face with violent intent, so you know what to do. Implicit in the act of mastering snowboarding is the act of getting up. You lift your face, retract arms splayed out in front of you and wipe the smear from your sunglasses. Then you roll about on your back like an upended cockroach, five feet of snowboard bound to your feet, slashing a fiberglass arc through the air.

Unlike skis, a snowboard stays bound to your feet during even the most murderous impact. Better luck taking a hacksaw to your knees. The effect is not unlike wearing cement boots, only you don’t have to go on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride before you settle on the bottom of some remote bog.

Snowboarding’s allure is no secret. Nearly 2 million snowboarders clot ski slopes around the country, giving pause to skiers and birth to an impressive culture. Asked why he wore a nose ring, one top snowboarding professional replied, “Because everyone else was having their tongues pierced.”

Before you try snowboarding, you go to a local sporting goods store where you talk with a snowboarding clerk who apparently is not working on commission.

“You’ll spend most of the day sitting on your butt,” he says.

Your friends are more enthusiastic.

“I’ve watched it on TV,” J.T. says when you call him up. “It looks like fun.”

J.T. pauses. “I have no idea how people stop.”

This may explain why J.T. declines an invitation to accompany you on a trip to Mountain High in Wrightwood. But your friend Brian is enthusiastic about the adventure, though you suspect he is equally excited about skipping work. Brian, it turns out, also has some experience. He once had a snowboard. Fortunately for him that was in 1980, when the big resorts wouldn’t let snowboarders anywhere near their mountains.

But most ski resorts have done an abrupt about-face, welcoming snowboarders with open arms. Skiing has slumped while snowboarding has boomed, and resort operators have come to realize that the snowboard crowd has enough money to spring for nose rings and a lift ticket, too.

Mountain High (about 2 1/2 hours east of Ventura) is no exception. Not only has the resort built a half-pipe for snowboarders, but it also offers snowboard lessons for anyone willing to pay $55 and sign a lengthy release waiver.

You and Brian have signed on for lessons. Your instructor, Krystina, is perky and honest.

“Snowboarding is harder to learn than skiing, definitely,” says Krystina, eyeing you, Brian and your other classmates, three anxious 11-year-old boys and their escort, Nancy, a woman in her early 40s.

“When can we jump?” chirps one of the nippers.

Thankfully, we don’t start with jumping. Krystina begins the lesson by having the class walk around. We limp about like someone who has just stepped on a nail at a construction site and picked up a five-foot slab of board along with it.

Nancy falls. Sitting in the snow, she is unhappy. “I could see where people would snap their legs real easy doing this,” she says. “I hate this. I want my skis back.”

Perhaps hoping to distract the class from mutiny, Krystina ushers everyone quickly through the basics of gliding and turning, then escorts her limping ducklings to the chairlift that will take us to the top of the beginner slope. Brian clangs into the chair. You fall in next to him. As the chair pulls away, you neglect to lift the tip of your board. It catches in the snow and the chair pitches forward violently.

“Lift your tip! Lift your tip!” screams Brian. “Oh man, we’re going to die.”

Frankly, you regard this as unnecessary sniveling--the fall is only eight or nine feet. But the nose of your snowboard pulls free and the lift continues up. Nonetheless, Brian’s enthusiasm appears to have dampened.

“I’m going to kill you for this,” he says.

From the chairlift you can see over to the advanced run. Around a bend, a snowboarder appears, carving sinuous, powdery arcs across the nosebleed slope. Just what you need to distract Brian from the still wobbling chairlift. You nod toward the snowboarder.

“That looks like fun,” you say at the precise moment the snowboarder goes down hard.

“Which part?” Brian says.

Krystina gathers the class at the top of the slope.

“When you’re going down the hill you want to ride on the edge of the board, turning back and forth,” she says. “Always apply the edge into the top of the hill. When you’re facing the hill, you’re up on your toes edging into the hill. When your back is to the hill, you’re using your heels to dig the edge of the board into the hill. Don’t stick your butt out. If you do, you’ll lose it. “

She nods. “OK. Go when you’re ready. We’ll meet up halfway down the hill. Lots of turns, so you keep your speed down.”

As with any piece of equipment on the feet of a beginner, the snowboard is a wicked thing with a mind all its own. As soon as you launch over the edge of the hill, the board refuses to turn. Its tip, shaped like a swollen thumb, points resolutely straight downhill. In a blink, you are going much faster than you’d like. You whip past your classmates, who are gathered midway down the slope absorbing another lesson.

“Go for it!” shouts one of the nippers.

Attempting to turn, you dig the wrong edge into the snow. The board stops dead. You continue forward briefly, face slamming into the snow.

Krystina glides down. “We were just working on stopping, but you already know how to do that,” she says.

It is comforting lying in the snow, listening to the hiss of passing skiers. Plus it’s hard to fall when you are already lying down. But Krystina isn’t being paid to teach you how to impersonate a mogul.

“Falling is part of the deal,” she says cheerily, helping you up. “By the end of the day, you’ll be surprised. You’ll come down the slope with only one or two falls.”

Krystina escorts us through two more runs, then leaves to conduct another lesson. Before she goes, she congratulates everyone on their progress. Perhaps encouraged by this feedback, Brian asks how long it will be before we can go on the half-pipe.

“Probably two years,” says Krystina. “I would stay on the bunny slope a bit longer. Keep practicing.”

What you practice most is getting up. Beginning snowboarders spend an inordinate amount of time sitting in the snow: A ski slope pocked by novice snowboarders, seated at varying distances from one another, looks like a gathering of antisocial penguins.

Getting up isn’t easy either. Positioning the board in front of you, you grab the far edge with your hand and pull yourself forward into a squat. Do that a hundred times and military training seems easy.

To your annoyance, Brian has proved an adept snowboarder. He glides easily downhill, negotiating turns smoothly and falling only about half as often as you do. He also has an annoying habit of stopping and waiting for you, then cackling madly when you go down in a heap.

There is a degree of trust inherent on the slopes, the understanding being that skiers do not schuss into other skiers. But snowboarders aren’t skiers. You careen down the slope, warning skiers off by shouting expletives and waving your arms in increasingly widening circles like that old gym-class warm-up. You don’t fall as often, but only because you are covering large chunks of ground at uncontrollable speeds.

After several runs dotted by hard falls, you meet up with Brian, who is sitting in the snow at the top of the intermediate slope.

“I’ve had enough,” he says. “I’m so tired, I just keep falling and I don’t even care.”

You agree to snowboard to the bottom and pack it in. On the descent, you prove Krystina right. You fall only twice.