Learning to carve at Monarch
Contributed by tom. March 2004.
Activity: Carving
Location: Monarch
Carving
Carving -- I saw the movies of Patrice and Jacques on the web (at www.extremecarving.com) and it looked amazing. Lucky for me, both Scott and Lisa are great fans of this type of boarding, and they put me on a spare hardboot setup. It was pretty weird at first -- with the toes pointed so much more to the front of the board (50deg front, 40deg back) I found that I couldn't rely on the back foot to throw the board around. It was time to start using the entire body...
Laying it down
I flailed a lot that day -- but I also got a few turns that made me feel elated. This sport is a lot of fun -- and I take back anything bad I may have said about snowboarding :) I had some fairly spectacular falls on Sunday, the biggest one involving falling straight back and falling on my butt. I felt as if I ripped something back there, and I felt an urgent desire to take my pants off and go sit in a deep pile of cold snow in the forest...
A few of my other falls dealt with not knowing (a) how to finish a carve and (b) how to transition properly to a heel turn. My toe side was much stronger than the heel side... and so in the movie below you can see a number of time that I carved to the side of the slope and just flew off into air :)
Learning to carve, lots of falls
Now, between being in heaven with the feeling of getting an occasional carve turn and recently buying an Apple laptop with iMovie, I re-edited the learning/flailing film into one with just the good turns. Hardly inspirational, but watching it reminds me of the feeling I had that day.