First Time Snowboarding In The Terrain Park (What You Need To Know)
The snowboard terrain park is at once the most exhilarating, terrifying, exciting, frustrating place on the mountain for most snowboarders. Everyone remembers the first time they landed a 360. They likely also remember the struggle they went through to get there.
If you have always looked a the terrain park with intrigue as you rode by.
If you want to slide a box or hit a park jump.
This guide is for you.
As with most things in life, riding park takes commitment and drive to conquer. It draws on the fundamentals of snowboarding, giving you a place to test your skills in an environment where success and failure are obvious.
I have often had clients express their frustration at not being able to do a 360 after their 3rd/4th/5th attempt.
Do you remember the first turns you made?
How do they compare to the ones you make now?
How many turns do you think you have made to get there?
There is no fast track in snowboarding, each skill needs to be built upon another. The snowboard terrain park is no different.
BUT! We can be smart about progression. We can put the time into the right steps, and minimize the struggle ahead of us. The struggle and more importantly the pain!
Let these steps help you work through conquering the snowboard terrain park in the right order to set yourself up for success.
First Time Snowboarding In The Terrain Park: What You Need To Know
Working as a snowboard trainer at one of the biggest resorts in the world, I am often running park sessions. Ranging from teaching instructors about park safety and how to manage a group of eight 10 year old’s in the terrain park, to high level athletes riding large and extra-large features.
The steps below are what I would (and have) taught my mum, to ride park on her snowboard.
1. Park Etiquette And Navigation
There are two types of people new to the terrain park:
Those who enter the ropes at the top of the terrain park, nervous about being in someone else’s way.
And those who zig zag their way through the features with the whole family, oblivious to the world around them.
Judging by the fact you’re here reading this article I am pretty confident that you are the former. Which is a very good thing.
The park can be an intimidating place, particularly when its busy. Let’s look how to navigate the terrain park and what is the snowboard park etiquette.
Park Etiquette
Never duck ropes in or around the terrain park - While this is true of most of the mountain, in the park ropes are important guides to block you from accidentally moving into the run-in or landing of a feature.
If not riding a feature be aware of where you are standing - Make sure you are out of the way of any drop in or landing zones. It can be a great idea when you first enter the park at the top to stand off to the side and get a “lay of the land”.
When it is your turn, call out “dropping” to let those around you know you are ready to go. - You may be the only one who does this. You may feel silly doing this. Feeling silly is better than feeling broken because someone hit the jump at the same time you did.
Where features are close together, ride them or ride beside them - Often features are set up in a way that they need to be linked together to have enough speed. Try not to stop between them as often you are hard to see from above and someone may be coming behind you.
Obey spotters and respect the park crew - If ever you see skis/snowboards/rakes crossing the entrance to a feature, it is off limits. Either it is being worked on or someone has had a crash and needs help from patrol. This also applies to spotters (often instructors or photographers) holding their arms out wide horizontally or in a X above their head. Both of these mean do not go.
Crashed? Get out the way. - Everyone crashes, it’s part of progressing. Make sure you get out of the landing zone as soon as possible. You can stop and think about what happened once you’re safely off to the side. Getting landed on sucks big time.
Most of these are common sense, if you approach park etiquette by being mindful of other users you will do just fine.
Navigating the terrain park
There is way more room than you think - Don’t be afraid to move through the park looking at features without riding them (this is actually a good thing). Just make sure you are off to the side of any run-in or landings.
Always check out the features before you ride them - The terrain park changes regularly. Do a lap riding through the park (keeping to the sides) to look at the features you intend on trying, feel how fast the snow is and get warmed up.
The terrain park is always quieter in the mornings - Once the park crew has had time to go through and make sure everything is as it should be (usually the first hour or two of the day) the park is usually quiet. This is a great time to get used to the environment and practice your skills without the intimidations of the crowds.
One big reason for this and a negative depending on the climate of your local resort is that the snow is often quite firm in the mornings.
Weekends are busy - If you can make it up mid week to venture into the terrain park for the first time you will almost certainly have a better experience.
Snow conditions matter - To be successful in the terrain park you want consistency. If the snow is icy it can be dangerous, so too can slushy or soft days. Don’t be fooled into waiting till the snow is soft to try and progress. Having to guess if you’re going the right speed each time, means you can’t focus on the task at hand.
2. Pre-Requisite Skills
Think of the terrain park as a place to test and improve this skills you already have.
To set yourself up for success, we want to make sure you are able to do a few of the basics outside of the park first.
You should be comfortable doing the following:
Snowboarding in a straight line down the fall line (the direction a ball would roll) on a green slope for 10 meters. This should be done with your body stacked and centered over the board like you would be after strapping in and standing still on the flats.
Able to do a little jump while performing number 1, landing with the board flat and feeling stable as you do it.
The ability to ride off a small drop or up a side hit getting a little bit of air landing with your board straight down the fall line.
These are important because every feature in the terrain park has a period of time in which we have to be okay with not being able to stop or slow down. What allows us to do this is the understanding that shortly afterward we will have more than enough space and easy terrain to do so.
Where most people go wrong when learning to ride in the terrain park is this one point which leads them to catching edges or landing on their butt.
Snowboards are awesome. They are what allow us to ride such big jumps and land without feeling the impact. By spreading the force of the landing over a larger surface area (the base of the snowboard) the impact on our body is greatly reduced. In addition to this because of the forward momentum and slippery surface much of this force is redirected forward and not into our body.
When we turn sideways and try to slow down too soon we effectively eliminate both of these benefits. Suddenly that slippery surface is replaced with a sharp edge designed to slow us down. This not only increases the pressure of the landing as the forces aren’t redirected but also takes that nice big surface area and turns it into one even smaller than if we had just landed on our feet.
3. How To Hit A Jump
Because we have taken the time to get confident with the pre-requisite skills above we are ready to talk about hitting a jump for the first time.
In our warm up run we hopefully took note of how fast the snow is today. This is important because in order for the jump to do its job we need to approach it with the correct speed. The single best way to work this out and one that I personally use for my own riding is; spend some time watching others. Let them be your guinea pig. This should give us a good idea of how fast we need to approach the jump to make it passed the knuckle (where the flat middle section starts to curve and go down to the landing).
Now that we know the speed, lets take out the guess work of how many turns to make by eliminating them altogether. We are going to sideslip our way down to the point where, by pointing our board straight down hill towards the middle of the take off, we will have the right speed to clear the jump.
This does a few things; it gives us time to relax on the approach without thinking about how fast we are going or how much speed we just lost on the last turn. It lets us stand centered in the middle of the board. Most importantly we are now in the basic position we are going to be for the entire duration of the feature.
There is one last thing we are going to do to help increase our chances of success. We call it popping. In reality it is more of a pressing feeling.
One of the common misconceptions with people new to hitting jumps is that they need to “jump” off the jump. The way Terrain Park jumps are built, we could take our board off and point it at the jump, from the right height there is a pretty good chance it would make it to the landing safely (never do this by the way). This works because of basic physics. The shape of the take off creates an arc in the air that lines up with the angle of the landing.
When we pop/press on a jump what we are actually trying to achieve is stability in the air. By creating some upward momentum ourselves we change the arc of the board in the air allowing it come up into us giving us the feeling of being small and stable.
With all this in mind we are going to follow four simple steps:
Approach the jump in a straight line with our board flat.
Bend our knees then press against the force of the jump pushing back at us.
Let the board come up towards us and stay calm in the air
Land with the board flat and continue to ride in a straight line for 3-4 meters before attempting to slow down.
Success! If all has gone according to plan and we managed to stay relatively calm for the duration we should now be safely claiming our first time clearing a jump in the Terrain Park.
From here all that is left to do is build that mileage and repetition through riding the same or similar jumps over and over till this becomes as comfortable as linking a turn.
4. How To Slide A Box
Sliding across pieces of metal and plastic on our snowboards may seem intimidating but in practice follow very similar principles to hitting a jump.
A box or rail is just a low friction surface we can slide on which we are unable to make any changes to our direction or speed via edging.
There is really only one reason people crash on boxes. They were unbalanced and outside the framework of their board. 90% of the time this is due to our instinctive reaction to get lower as we get onto the feature. As we bend through our knees and hips our weight starts to move. If we are not careful and either our hips move too far backwards as we lean away from the danger, or our shoulders too far forwards as we try to get our head closer to the ground, we end up with more weight over one edge of the board causing it to tip.
On a box this is no good. As soon as the board starts to tip it does one of two things; if it is the downhill edge it bites into the plastic/metal surface and stops causing us to catch the edge and fall. If its the uphill edge it starts to slide faster underneath our body as there is less surface area and thus less friction causing us to slip out and crash.
Luckily all of this can be avoided by doing the physically simple task of just standing upright over our board. I won’t argue this can be extremely challenging psychologically.
So to slide a box for the first time we can follow these simple steps:
Start from the same height you would if the length of the box was a jump and you were looking to make it to the landing without any set up turns on the approach.
Approach the box in a straight line towards the center of the box with our board flat.
If a jump on box (gap with snow) use the same technique of pressing into the small take off to get onto the box. If a ride on box (no gap with snow) there is no need to jump.
Stay in the same tall athletic position you used to keep your board flat on the approach as you slide across the box.
Absorb the landing and continue to ride in a straight line for 3-4 meters before attempting to slow down.
Congratulations! You just crushed your first attempt at riding a box in the terrain park. From here all that is left to do is build confidence on similar features and progressing towards ones that are narrower or have some up/down variation in them.