Riding class with Lowell Hart at Vail
Contributed by tom. April 2006.
Activity: Alpine snowboarding
Location: Vail
We heard great things about a hardbooting instructor, Lowell Hart, from Vail. He wrote "The Snowboard Book (A guide for all boarders)", a book which I had ordered but that had not arrived before we left. We set up a lesson with him a week prior. We met him around 8am, in time to get on the first chair at 8:30am. The day was great -- Lowell is a great instructor, makes a lot of effort to communicate in ways that makes sense to the students, drawing parallels to a variety of subjects.
He had us work on separation of joints and on understanding ways that we can control the board in varying degrees of accuracy. We worked on edge transitions using only ankles, then knees, then hips, and finally the entire body. We worked on extension/retraction, which I knew as push-pull. We rode steeps, we rode flats, and we rode switch. I had an absolute blast. We did a lot of exercises such as hangers (ankle-driven edge transitions while traversing hills), following tracks, and more. Around lunch time our lesson was over, and Lowell asked us if we'd mind if he tagged along for the rest of the day. Which, of course, we thought was a great idea. And so we rode together the rest of the day, with Lowell showing us all types of great runs, from the front face to the back bowls.
It was an outstanding day -- we were up on the first chair, and caught the last chair too (had to duck under ropes for it). Lowell shot a lot of video and showed us what we were and weren't doing, and left us with exercises that we can do on our own. I discovered that Vail is a great place to ride, and hope to ride with Lowell again.
Lowell not only sent us a DVD with all the footage that he shot, but also allowed me to post it here. I used the DVDxDV software to convert the DVD into something I can work with, and the movie has the trial banner across it. Oh well.