What are your riding goals? Is anything holding you back?
That’s awesome to hear, @saltyseadog. I’m stoked it helped. Great effort and thanks for the update! ?
No real practice for me on the weekend, was snowing both days and spent my time chasing pow stashes in the trees. Rode the park once and way too much fresh on both kickers and landings to be worth hitting. Got a week off coming up this friday so should theoretically have plenty of time to practice coming up!
Thanks for the advice @rider26 as you would have saw on FB i pretty much paid off the park on the weekend and just shredded the pow. Had the heaviest stack i have had in years, as i ollied off a feature my tail caught a hidden tree branch and slammed me into the face of the rock and i fell about 4 metres, when i hit the bottom i landed on my elbow on a rock underneath. Photo shows me right in the middle in a puff of pow. Photos don’t do the steepness justice.
My knee got banged up and i got 6 stitches from a decent gash, also found out today i also re-fractured my left elbow again from the same fall, i’m lucky it wasn’t worse. I didn’t think my knee was that bad and shredded for another half an hour after the stack, we went back in for lunch and then noticed my pants drenched in blood and realised i had a pretty gnarly flesh wound. Went and got it stitched up and made the most of the local anesthetic and shredded the arvo, snow was just too good, such a rad weekend. Boards in getting fixed now, hopefully they can work some magic. Spewing i’m away with work for the next 3 weeks.
Got back to basics and did all different variants of 180’s off anything i could find. It’s amazing how much fun it is when you take a step back and really work hard on style, thanks heaps for the tips mate. When i get back it will be the end of the season, perfect time to try and dial this FS 360.
Jebus that doesn’t look nice! Sorry to hear you hurt yourself mate but seems like it didn’t slow you up too much!
Sorry to hear about your injuries, @Jake, but stoked to hear about your progression. Heal up quickly, mate!
I’ve got 4 months in Japan ahead of me and at the end of it my goal is to nail a backflip. I dunno if I’ll get there as I’ve only just started getting air tricks but thats the goal.
Last week was fun, rode 10 days in a row which is about the most i think ive ever rode in a row. Wednesday probably hard counts as we didnt go up till about 2 when the rain stopped and rode for about an hour.
Had a few cracker days with the wife and friends ripping across all 4 resort areas and racking up some decent vertical.
Thursday and Friday my wife had to go home for work and so i seized these two days to ride for me. She likes the park but really only piper and the small side of bluecow. Also being mid week it meant way smaller crowds so i committed to riding Leichardt all day both days to work on some stuff on larger jumps and get some proper float time.
All in all i did 50 laps through Leichardt over the two days based on my dashboard stats. The first day i really spent a lot of runs getting my speed right which really helped when it came time to spin.
Happily out of the 30 or so F3 off the heels i went for, i landed probably 5 with no grab really nicely and about 15 with an indy grab. I probably only fell 3 times and the rest i landed with some revert or ugly enough to not hit the rest of the jump line for lack of speed.
The other two jumps i hit straight and grabbed stale then tail, each time i stuck the entire line perfect i was grinning like an idiot at the end ha ha ha.
Nothing quite like repetition to get a trick down. Added bonus was watching the pros warm up each day through Leichardt, Craig McMorris was there both days and i found myself on a tbar with Dan Brisse at one point. Didnt know who he was till he told me but i did recognise the name and was actually a really nice guy.
Mate, that’s awesome! Stoked to hear it! ?
Dan Brisse is a legend… he goes HARD! I didn’t know he was in Perisher.
I’m not looking to improve park skills - 48 next birthday and I’ve only been snowboarding 11 years. I’ve done some park days - it’s not for me.
What I’m after in my rider progression now is being more aggressively engaged with steep fall lines - and not going face first into the powder because I attacked it too hard.
Stepping up a level in Chile I discovered a few things:
*I freak out at high speed on steeps. By trying to keep my speed in check and stay in control I’m setting off too much sloughing.
*the steeper it gets the less likely I am to be perpendicular to the slope, which puts me in the back seat. Dumb. I need to overcome that mental voice screaming ‘you’re going to die’ and just commit to the line.
*all of the above makes executing a toe side turn hard freaking work!
*part of my mental barrier to being more aggressive over the front foot in those conditions comes from going nose in and over the handlebars a few times. The spinal compression from a scorpion fall in those conditions is not fun. Neither is setting off the airbag. So caution translates to bad form.
I guess I know what I’m doing wrong. I just need to practice. Repetition. Maybe short stretches of steep where I can harness the fear for a really short time knowing it’s over quick.
What sort of terrain are you talking about LMB? Never been to Chile and when you talk about sloughing I start to imagine a 35-40 degree pitch and alaskan style terrain ha ha!
About the closest I’ve come to steep terrain would be main range out at Carruthers but that’s only in spring corn never mid winter pow. I do remember that it’s intimidating as hell rolling in over the top blind, it’s steep, over 30 degrees you immediately start worrying about hitting ice, losing your edge and sliding uncontrollably into the lake 300m below. Once you realise it’s corn and your edges are fine you can have a good go at it and the pitch is your friend.
I spose you could always hike up the run your looking at so you know what the snow conditions are like or let a more experienced rider guinea pig and report back. Sounds like a confidence thing more than anything, maybe getting more comfy at speed on groomers might help?
Thanks @NBG , you are right - it’ll just be repetition and pushing it bit by bit. It’s most definitely a mental thing.
Chile was a huge range. No groomers in the Andes, so you got what you got and just skied the line. Nice cruisey stuff through to very steep stuff where the instruction was most definitely do not stop - keep speed. That was where I found my heart in my mouth!
Didn’t really get too many pics of the steepest stuff (too busy getting down!) but this screen shot of PB from our Chile video is indicative of the stuff that I’m talking about. I’m one of the dots at the top waiting to go next.
I also struggled dropping cornices or glaciers - but that’s an ‘air’ thing. So I need to practice launching off stuff more and trusting I can land it. Having joint issues (inflammatory arthritis due to Lupus and being hyper mobile) I worry I’ll total myself and be out for the rest of the season.
Few more Chile pics for context
We dropped the left face (right was a sheer rock drop just out of shot)
The pics don’t really do the pitch justice. But this is about the level that I’m comfortable at. Steeper than this is what I need to work on.
I had a little accident (yeah, ok, epically ate shit!) and the airbag deployed. That hurt. It’s doing this kind of idiotic stuff that keeps me holding back rather than being as aggressive as I’d like.
I wasn’t sure I’d get up at the time, I was still pretty rattled when PB took that pic.
It’s 4 weeks down the track and I’m still visiting the Physio weekly…
It didn’t stop me matching the lads run for run over there, and I’m still in the gym since coming back ... But it’s still an injury. And I don’t really like getting hurt!
You stacked hard enough to deploy the airbag?!
HOLY! Good job. I’ve never heard of that happening before.
Looks like you had some fun out there though, great shots!
Good luck in the gym, fast recoveries 
You stacked hard enough to deploy the airbag?!
HOLY! Good job. I’ve never heard of that happening before.Looks like you had some fun out there though, great shots!
Good luck in the gym, fast recoveries
Not sure stacking that hard was an achievement I’m particularly proud of.
Guide 1 also said he’d never seen that happen before - and given he was on the freeride tour for 10 years that really made me feel like a goose.
Guide 2 said he has seen it before - which made me feel better. But having said that he didn’t have time to pull the trigger in a big Avie and despite being fully buried his didn’t deploy.
Basically it was the way I fell - the trigger was ‘pulled’ by the force of my shoulder/chest hitting and sliding through the snow. I scorpioned hard. Very gumby! 
I’m lucky I didn’t do more damage really.
All good injury wise now.
Released from Physio 
Happy Days!
That’s crazy about the airbag, @LMB!
*I freak out at high speed on steeps. By trying to keep my speed in check and stay in control I’m setting off too much sloughing.
You can work on this. Practice making shorter, more aggressive turns. Initiate quickly with your upper body and steer strongly with your lower body. One should follow the other in quick succession (almost simultaneously). You can practice this anywhere (it doesn’t need to be steep, work your way up to steep). Make the shortest turns possible while keeping your turns consistent and complete. You’re right, repetition here will help!
*the steeper it gets the less likely I am to be perpendicular to the slope, which puts me in the back seat. Dumb. I need to overcome that mental voice screaming ‘you’re going to die’ and just commit to the line.
Pretend you’re bouncing a basketball with your front hand. Practice this. It forces you to get your weight forward. Also, consciously dip your front shoulder down the slope.
*all of the above makes executing a toe side turn hard freaking work!
In the photo of you making a toeside turn, you can visually see you are counter-rotated. See how your upper body is open towards the slope instead of being turned into the turn (and not aligned with what your snowboard/lower body is doing)? That mixed signal runs all the way down to the snowboard. You can see your open upper body is twisting the hips, causing you to lean back.
Try to rotate your upper body into the turn to keep your entire body consistent with where you want your snowboard to go. More likely than not, you did the right things to initiate the turn; the key is holding that position throughout the entire turn until completion. If you’re opening back towards the slope, that means you’re ready to make the next turn. Does that make sense?
That said, when riding pow you obviously need to keep the nose up. This doesn’t mean you “lean” back. It’s more a “shift” of your hips towards the tail. Your upper body shouldn’t be leaning back (upper body stays perpendicular to the board).
*part of my mental barrier to being more aggressive over the front foot in those conditions comes from going nose in and over the handlebars a few times. The spinal compression from a scorpion fall in those conditions is not fun. Neither is setting off the airbag. So caution translates to bad form.
You need to convince yourself that riding with proper technique and more aggressively, is actually safer. It needs to be your mentality. It’s completely true as well. If you’re not aggressive with the terrain, the terrain will be aggressive with you. Related: speed is your friend (it encourages better technique and gives you stability).
Let me know if have any questions.