Snow Skills

Separate the upper body from the legs at the hip joint.

The ability to twist the legs without steering the body is crucial to short turns. Stand in a hip-width stance without skis on flat terrain. Using your poles to stabilize your upper body, explore twisting your feet with all the parts of your legs from the hips down. The best twisting movement is one where the toes and heels move a similar distance to leave an hourglass shape in the snow.

Next, twist your feet without using the poles and focus on isolating the movement of your legs in relation to your body. Now, apply this move in gentle parallel turns by focusing on twisting your legs together such that the skis turn more than your body. You’ll find your balance is more steady from turn to turn and your short turns more precise.

Want to become an expert skier? Use your pole swings all the time.

The motion of your poles can provide a significant boost to your skiing skills on diamond terrain. The ability to swing your outside pole to establish the beginning on a new turn will add timing and flow to your skiing and produce steadier balance and movements in higher-gravity areas. Focus on swinging the pole evenly out and back and let that swing be the result of wrist movements as opposed to a reaching motion by the arm. Skiing without a pole swing is like The Lone Ranger without Tonto: it’s really noticeable that something’s missing.

It’s the chicken or the egg question of skiing: do the hands time your turns or do your turns time the hands? In terrain and conditions such as moguls, steeps, trees, powder, and Spring snow, it really doesn’t matter which answer is right. Either way, a series of relatively short linked turns are best made by keeping the hands and legs working in concert. Key to those movements is the commitment to the turn that a good pole swing adds to your skiing.

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Skiing and riding in the trees relies on both physical and mental aspects to successfully make it through a run. While the physcial aspects are most important, you can help set yourself up for success by developing mental concepts that support those moves. Since avoiding the trees is the goal, you can be more successful at that goal if you let yourself think different about what composes a turn in the trees. Instead of thinking of turning around them, you can create more room for yourself in the trees by thinking about skiing at an angle past them.

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Tree skiing and riding is surely for the adventurous; there’s a new set of rules when you choose to abandon open groomed trails for the limited space and variable conditions of a glade. You’re going to have several things to worry about in a short amount of time and you’re going to want to put as many factors in your favor as possible. Under these conditions, you can prepare and plan a number of small details that can add up to make your tree skiing and riding more successful and safer.

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There’s no better terrain at a ski area to convince you to live in the moment than tree skiing. It’s an awesome parallel between moving along through the trees and moving along in your life. In both, you’re going to pass by many distinct points, which come with little prior notice and are gone in a blink of an eye. There’s no time to hold on to anything in the glades; you’ll need to create turns promptly and release them quickly.

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Tree skiing could be one of the most challenging terrain choices. Even experienced skiers can be reluctant to ski in close proximity of large, immobile objects from which a collision can only make you worse for wear. Some glades seem to have an aura of a Forbidden Zone, similar in manner that the maps of early explorers marked the edge of the world with; “Here be Monsters”.

Well, not all glades are built the same and running into obstacles is more optional in a glade than conventional wisdom allows. Skiing in the trees is all about finding the open space. Football great Jim Brown said he used to “Run to daylight”. His focus was on going where there was room to go, not fixating on where he couldn’t.
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Skiing and snowboarding in thick fog can be very difficult. When the snow is white, the air is white, and visibility is at a minimum, skiing and snowboarding can become quite difficult. Feeling stiff and “disconnected” from your equipment becomes difficult. So how do you cope?

First, attempt to relax. Many people take up “defensive” postures and tighten muscles they would not ordinarily tense while skiing or snowboarding. Try to systematically relax each muscle group from toe to head.
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