Snowboarding on the decline?

[burton71]

I've lost track of how many snowboards I've had lol. Currently have 4 that all get used fairly regularly.

 

Snowboarding isn't going anywhere.

[Justo8484]

I've broken more skis than most people have owned.

[poconoceancity]

And most of those 138 days were on skis behind a 3 or 4 year old. This is the first season since I have had children that I will get over 30 days in. Before kids I always got 50 plus days in. I will get back to that number soon. Now that the girls are getting older I can extend the rental and start taking a spring break ski trip also.

[poconovfr]

Great thread. Here's a thought, something I see more and more everyday is people coming back to skiing. Not so much that the number of snowboarders is declining but the number of initial boarders say from like the mid 80's through the late 90's are retuning to skis from boards and free heel. I started riding in '86 only because you can only ski down Marjies so many times in a before you're bored as fuck. In comes snowboarding. It was cool and it was new and in a short time with some effort you could ride the entire mountain. And powder? Shit boards floated skis did not. Out goes the skis in comes the boards. Back in '86 there was very little known about boarding and very little equipment to be had. My first boots were Sorrels with as a Nordica 980 liner stuffed in them . Duct tape that up and you were good for the day. My first pair of board specific boots were Jack's boots mailed ordered in from Co. Skis just couldn't carve like a board especially if you were on a hard boot and plate set up. The Euro's had that shit dialed in. Didn't touch skis again. Fast forward....I guess what, '99' I laid eyes on a dude on skis carving it up like a board. Elan parabolics. Eye opener. Looked super fun and it was a ski. Boarding was fun but now I could traverse and get around a big mountain again a lot fuckin' easier. So long board. Today I have 3 skis in my quiver and 2 boards. I ride maybe 4 days a year. The short of it...I see lots of folks I've been on the hill with for 30 years. Tele, boarding even gay blades, the one thing I have noticed over the last 4-5 years is the large return to skis. Full circle. Now a board will last me 10 years due to lack of use as to where shit I'd burn through at least a board a season maybe 2 if it was a shitty snow year. Skis I pick up new pair every other year just to keep the collection fresh. Then there's my kids.....

[Mixilplix]

I too started riding in the early eighties...of course I couldn't ride at any resort cause they wouldn't have any of that kinda stuff on the hill...but I stuck with it and taught wyself to ride..and when they started to open the doors to resorts I was like fuck yeah!!..There was only a handfull of people that rode and if you saw omebody riding you either knew them or you went over and got to know them....It was so cool to be at the begining of what everybody thought was going to be a fad....90 some percent of the skiers thought you should be kicked off the mountain...it was awesome..out of all my friends I was the only one who snowboarded.....

I never skied before I snowboarded....Around the mid 90's I gave it a try. it was OK, but I still like snowboarding way more....(I never had to hike back up the hill to retrieve my equipment after a fall)...But as Poconovfr said,Elan came out with parabolics.When I saw them I thought the people that said it's just a fad/you shouldn't be alowed on the mountain are now skiing snowboard tech...So I bought a used pair of Atomics and gave it another try in the eary 2000's....used them I couple of time and then they ended up for sale.Just didn't do it for me.Still like snowboarding better.Parks were really starting to come into there own and you could ride at just about any resort.Tech in snowboard had come along way also..They made beginner specific boards,carving boards(although they had been making them for sometime)boards with different flex..Plus the media was all over snowboarding.Everybody thought it was just soooo cool.When I was an instructor there was just endless amounts of kids wanting to learn to snowboard.The money coming in was great for tech and the huge popularity was great for upstart companies, but lost was the coolness of a fringe sport.That's what I miss most in snowboarding..

Fast forward to present day...I don't ride the park anymore(responcibility got in the way)but still love to ride...Bumps now have replaced the park..but I ride at BC most of the time and bumps are not always present....So I bought a pair of Lib Tech skis and am having an absolute blast on them...It's made BC a little more challenging for me.I still prefer a snowboard as my main mode down the hill but skiing is fun man...

I feel the rise of park skiing and it's people have a lot to do with snowboardings decline(if it really is declining)

 

Holy shit what a wall of text!!!

 

 

[toast21602]

some good stories and conversation in here. i'm enjoying it.

[Justo8484]

A lot of what people wrote about the early days of snowboarding mirrors my experience with the rise of freeskiing. I got a job in the rental shop at blue the year I turned 16 and bought a pair of salomon 1080s the second year they were available to the public. Blue built a park on sidewinder right around the same time, and it was the same deal as OG snowboarders. You'd see maybe two or three other guys in the park with twin tips and end up riding with then. Met a lot of cool people back then, some who have completely gotten out of it, but most are still killing it in their own ways, whether it's helping out the local scene here, or moved out west living the ski bum life.

[Barb]

I started snowboarding when my then 7 yr old son wanted to learn how to ride, but only if I would learn too. I had a lot of fun snowboarding in PA. After 8 years on a board I am still not very good at all. Out here, all my friends ski. I am giving skiing a try this season. I like the idea of being able to just go right off the lift, not having to strap in. Winter Park has a lot of flat sections so if you get stuck on one, which I usually do rounding up kids, you are screwed. To ski/ride from the winter park side to mary jane is almost uphill in some spots. I only did it on my board once and it was miserable, after that I took the bus over. Plus I seem to be getting all these right side injuries (back, hip, knee) and I feel like at least on skis you are more balanced, both sides working equally.

 

My 13 yr old gave me a ski lesson last weekend and I feel like I did better under his instruction than the private lesson I had last season. I have to credit the race coaches at JFBB because he was making me do the drills I used to watch him do. We were having a blast until his friend got hurt and we had to cut our day short. The one thing I have to say so far I dislike about skiing is the boots. Snowboard boots feel like slippers in comparison.

 

Overall I feel like we have less days on the snow here than back east. If we missed a weekend in the Poconos it was pretty boring at the beach in winter. But here there is always something fun to do, so you don't feel bad when you don't ski all the time.

[Johnny Law]

A lot of what people wrote about the early days of snowboarding mirrors my experience with the rise of freeskiing. I got a job in the rental shop at blue the year I turned 16 and bought a pair of salomon 1080s the second year they were available to the public. Blue built a park on sidewinder right around the same time, and it was the same deal as OG snowboarders. You'd see maybe two or three other guys in the park with twin tips and end up riding with then. Met a lot of cool people back then, some who have completely gotten out of it, but most are still killing it in their own ways, whether it's helping out the local scene here, or moved out west living the ski bum life.

 

Remember that feeling of the 1080's, I don't know if I've ever been so stoked on a ski and many years later I realized how bad of a ski it actually was. Still got a pair on the beater touring setup, though the first yellow version's I broke.

 

Early park was like the first time you heard that Seattle sound after all those years of that glam rock shit. It was in your face and immediate, everyone mostly sucked, I mean the idea of park riding had only existed for like a year so there wasn't that surfing like attitude that developed later. For every 20 snowboards you maybe saw one skier, lot of peeps asked about your double tips and told you skiers can't slide rails.

 

I want to say it was the first year the 1080's came out, Mt Snow had either the first or second year of the X-Games. Me and my cousin were trying to figure out what at the time seemed like just enormous table tops. We were from PA and had no fucking idea and spent hours casing the shit out of them. Some kid who was like 8 rolled up to us and just said you have to land on the down part and to go faster. I sent the next one and came down butter soft, I'm sure I had straight leg steeze and was rolling down the windows but I still remember that first real jump. It was like mainlining heroin and we spent the next 8 years throwing ourselves off everything with a lip.

 

I got old and the park shit really started to hurt but the skills still come into play, I know how to take a beater, like a ohh shit everything's coming off beater and I know how to keep that upper body quiet when catching some sweet sweet air. Once a year, normally at the end in CO when it's warm I spend a few hours throwing lazy 180's and for a moment I can really feel those early days. All the completely stupid shit and how much fun it was, how you knew your were in first on something that was gonna be huge, something that would forever change skiing. It was scary and exciting, some of it was weird (Mt. Snow can crusher) but that first real jump feeling was incredible, like for 1/2 a second your were Icarus, a Greek fucking myth flying through the fucking sky.

Edited January 31, 2014 by Johnny Law

[indiggio]

Ode to be a teenager again....