I like these articles.. they harken back to the days of the web before everything was all about advertising and SEO. I've been snowboarding for 21 years.. befo

I like these articles.. they harken back to the days of the web before everything was all about advertising and SEO. I've been snowboarding for 21 years.. before that I skied for about 8 or 9 as a kid. I also did a lot of XC skiing, for which I mostly shed a tear. There used to be so much more snow for that. I still have snowshoes, but that also takes a perfect convergence of a big storm + some free time to get to use them. Snowboarding has a super different learning curve than skiing. Snowboarding is much much harder the first few days. Very steep learning curve, very very easy to get hurt at the beginning. But then the learning curve gets easier in the intermediate stage. Skiing takes a long time to get to those perfect parallel turns. Snowboards offer some other stuff like riding switch that skiis don't really do. Going backwards on skis is way more niche. Snowboards suck on flat traverses compared to skis, but a good snowboard has amazing edge hold on ice compared to skis. The biggest thing that has changed that blows my mind is resorts are so anything goes. Want to do a back flip? No one cares. Jump off everything? Yah that's OK. Want stuff to do tricks off? We'll build that for you! Back in the 1990s on the east coast you could get kicked off for a little bunny hop off a mogul. Sometime in the end of the 90s the game changed dramatically. Last year I almost got hit very hard by a kid who had jumped off a jump and landed backwards and out of control. And I was in the lift line! The resort had built a jump close enough to a lift line that an uncontrolled landing could cause someone to collide with the line. Luckily I was a lot bigger than the kid and my snowboard was oriented such that I could dig my toe edge in and squat down like a football player and take the hit... neither of us got hurt.