Early rise for a 7am drive to North Lake Tahoe to get to the Donner Pass ski resort. A days lift pass cost us a bargain at $20 and i was off snowboarding for my first time. I've skied twice. Once in 1987 with school, in Switzerland and the other time to Austria about 5 years ago. It's fair to say that I'm no expert when it comes to alpine pursuits.
The idea of strapping a board to your legs and throwing yourself down a mountain never did strike me as sensible, especially when the only way of stopping is to fall over. After a while this gets very painful, but I was soon able to balance and was in control enough to more or less stop at very slow speeds. At this point the confidence grew and I got cocky and tried some things that I really shouldn't have. Having fallen over in splendid fashion and winding myself on numerous occasions my pride and confidence was ever so slightly dented, so i retired for lunch and re-evaluated my predicament. I toyed with the idea of sacking the snowboard and hiring skis for the afternoon (if nothing else to prove that i could stay upright), but I decided that I would not be beaten by a piece of wood and persevered with the board for the afternoon and won (almost).
By the end of the day, I'd been off the top of the mountain, had just about sorted out my heal edge, had a go at my toe edge and worked out that I was regular as opposed to goofy (I think). Now I'm not saying that i'm an expert, but I had learnt to only fall in soft places.
Snowboarding is much more unforgiving than skiing. If you catch an edge you have no way of staying up. Once down it takes an incredible amount of effort to flip the board round the right way and try to get yourself standing again. There are no poles to lean on. The whole process of snowboarding feels totally unnatural and I've got so many sore bits. Wrists, elbows, shoulders, neck, knees, feet, stomach, basically everywhere. I've no idea how beginners can get up tomorrow and do it again.
Having said all that I had so much fun doing it (or trying to) and I'll definitely do it again. At this moment I prefer skiing, but that's only because I know I can do that.
The facilities were far better than I've experienced in Europe and this was a cheap resort. There were no problems with snow. There was about 12 foot of snow on the ground and it was mainly soft (fortunately).
