The shoulder pops out of place as soon as I hit the snow. Immediately, I blame the gang of 12-year-old boys who’ve been ruling the mountain all day.
“Um, did you just dislocate your shoulder?”
I try to muster a very stoic nod. Those aren’t tears in my eyes. It’s just windy.
The gang of 12-year-olds hovers over me. The way I see it, it’s their fault I’m about to pass out on the side of the terrain park. They make riding rails look as easy as walking down the street. Ditto for every single Youtube clip of some kid throwing double flips off a jump. It seems the entire world has gone gaga for freeskiing. Meanwhile, I’m still stuck in the 20th century doing the same lame tricks I learned when I was 14 (spread eagle!). It’s like I’m sending Morse code when everyone else is tweeting.
In a desperate attempt to learn a couple of new tricks, I’ve embedded myself with Hegreness and the freeride team at Liberty University’s Snowflex Center, the country’s only public synthetic ski slope. The mountain is covered with tiny plastic bristles that are kept wet with a built-in sprinkler system. Imagine skiing on a giant, moist toothbrush, and you’ll begin to get the picture. The sensation of skiing on Snowflex is similar to skiing on real snow, but speeds are slower, and carving is more difficult. Liberty’s mountain is essentially a large terrain park with big kickers, half a dozen challenging rails, and a quarterpipe, all laid over a cushioned surface, making landings safer.
“I’ll try tricks on Snowflex that I wouldn’t attempt on real snow,” says Kevin Manguiob, Liberty’s snowboard team captain. “Real snow is too painful.”
More importantly, Snowflex can be ridden 365 days out of the year, regardless of the weather. Manguiob, for instance, went from barely being able to throw a 360 to consistently landing 1080s in just over a year of riding Snowflex. In operation just a year, Liberty’s Snowflex Center is becoming a hotbed of freeriding activity, and the school is poised to produce some of the region’s top terrain park talent. But can this ideal learning situation help an old(ish) skier become more park savvy?
Eric Hegreness is the founder and head coach of Liberty’s burgeoning freeride team and about to graduate from Liberty with a sports management degree. Post-grad plans are still up in the air, but there will definitely be a stint in Japan teaching freeskiing. Then maybe a summer skiing and teaching in New Zealand.
I feel certain that at no point during his travels abroad, will Eric ever have a pupil less suited for freeriding than me. I’m a perfectly adequate skier: put me on the steeps or moguls or trees and I excel. But throw a hand rail or jump the size of a Volkswagen in front of my skis, and I have as much grace as a pig on ice.
Eric nails an intimidating “C Box” effortlessly, then breaks down the sequence of movements I’ll need to execute to do the same thing on the pink baby box farther down the slope. He says things like “after bang.” I don’t know what “after bang” means, but I nod like I’ve been “after banging” for years.
The first “rail” Eric wants me to hit is a little kiddie box that’s painted pink, which is probably the least intimidating feature you’ll ever see in a terrain park. It may as well have a Dora the Explorer sticker on it, and yet, when I approach it for the first time, I get nervous, like I’m about to huck myself off a 30-foot cliff.
I’ve got to keep my feet wide and put my weight on my front foot. Riding a box or a rail is all about balance. If you’re off balance, the box will reject you.
I go through some visualization techniques and see myself approaching the box with confidence, transitioning to the feature with style, my hips low, my feet wide and balanced. In my mind, I am Shaun White about to win Olympic gold.
In reality, I am an awkward skier about to eat it on the Dora the Explorer box. My approach is fine, my transition onto the box is beautiful, but my feet are too close together and all my weight is on my back leg. As soon as my skis hit the box, they slide out from beneath me and I end up on my back.
I do it two more times with the exact same results.
There’s only one other person taking freeride lessons at Liberty today. It’s an eight-year-old boy who’s progressed seamlessly from hitting long boxes to practicing his landing off of the smaller kickers. It’s taken the same amount of time for me to bruise my ass and dislocate my shoulder trying to ride the Dora the Explorer box. It’s a surreal feeling, being envious of an eight-year-old.
Fast forward through three more attempts at the baby box and there I am clutching my shoulder, trying my best not to black out. After the accident, I decide to try my luck at aerials, but I get maybe six inches of air. I’m skiing with fear, and Eric can see it.
“You can’t do this stuff if you’re scared. You tense up and it doesn’t end well,” he says as we make our way back into the lodge. Instead of skiing more, Eric wants me to stick around for Liberty’s freeride team practice.
There’s one skier in particular he wants me to see: a kid who, according to Eric, “skis without fear.”
Tim Steltzer is by far the most advanced on the team. He’s a junior, studying to be an engineer. He’s 20 years old and learned to ski as a kid in his home state of Maine, but never tried any freeride tricks until Liberty built the Snowflex Center.
“We have a trampoline back home and I always loved jumping high and practicing spins,” Tim says. “But I was always too scared to try anything like that on real snow. Learning on real snow is painful.”
Within a week of skiing on Snowflex, Tim had progressed from basic jumping to throwing front flips and Cork 7s. By the end of his first Snowflex season, he was throwing Kangaroo 900s, a double side flip with a 180 that he lands switch. It’s the exact same trick that won the X-Games a couple of years ago.
“I always wanted to try a double side flip because they look awesome,” Tim tells me. “So I tried one and over-rotated. Then I thought, ‘why not keep over rotating?’ Stopping that amount of spin and landing on your skis is difficult, but after a few weeks, I could land it fairly consistently.”
I try to imagine the colossal cojones it takes to A) hit a jump that will send you flying 25 feet through the air…on skis; B) try a double side flip while flying 25 feet through the air; and C) make the decision to try to spin just a little more at the end “because it looks sick.”
I watch Tim throw one massive aerial after the other. He spends almost as much time upside down and in the air than planted firmly on the ground. Tim’s movements in the air are fluid–more like an object that’s been set into motion in the gravity void of deep space than a skier on a fake mountain above Lynchburg, Virginia.
Watching Tim’s acrobatics, it would be easy to think that he simply has no fear, but that would be wrong. Tim gets scared just like the rest of us.
“The first time you try a trick is always scary,” Tim says. “You throw it and you crash. But after that first time, you’ll lose a lot of that fear. After that, it’s a matter of building on that first attempt. You have to progress, going a little bigger each time. Then when you crash hard, you get scared again, and you have to go through the process all over.”
Eric is trying to encourage Tim to pursue freeskiing professionally. If Tim can go from never riding a park to throwing X-Games-worthy tricks within a year, there’s no telling what he could do with the right training.
Regardless of Tim’s obvious talent, making the leap from a standout on Liberty University’s freeride team to professional freeskier is no small feat. Tim knows this better than anyone.
“I’ve got to start hitting bigger jumps. The Snowflex jump is 25 feet. Pros are hitting 50 to 100-foot jumps,” Tim says, adding that he’s timid when it comes to launching those bigger distances. “There’s a 50-footer at my home mountain in Maine that I tried to hit last year. I overshot it. Landed hard. It scared the heck out of me. I’ve got to get over that fear if I’m going to progress.”
It’s comforting to know that even skiers like Tim, who seem superhuman on the slopes, are dealing with the same issues as the rest of us. He has to work up the courage to throw double side flips off of 50-foot jumps in order to go pro, and I have to somehow work up the courage to face the Dora the Explorer box again.
The rest of the team spends time hitting rails under the bright lights that surround the white plastic. The metallic scrape of boards on rails rings through the night as one trick leads to another. Eventually, the team migrates over to the jumps, where a steep and fast approach delivers you into one of three kickers: the easy roller that I was attempting to jump earlier in the day, a three-foot kicker that the eight-year-old spent the day mastering, and the six-foot kicker that will launch you 25 feet into the air. Most of the team launches off of the three-footer, but a few skiers and boarders can hit the six-footer with style.
I’m feeling a little defeated until I happen to see one of the boarders eat it hard while trying to tackle a kinked rail. He gets up, approaches the rail, and falls hard again. But he gets back up yet again. And if you took a ruler to the rail, you might notice that he made it a little farther along the feature the second time. It might just be a difference of six inches, but it’s progress. And in that six inches lies my hope. Even though I’m slightly too old to hang with the freeride kids, and even though I’m nursing a recently dislocated shoulder, there’s a slight chance that someday I’ll be able to style that Dora the Explorer box.
See an exclusive video of Eric Hegreness giving freeride lessons at Liberty’s Snowflex Center.
Freeride Lessons at Liberty Snowflex Center from Graham Averill on Vimeo.
BEST BEGINNER PARKS
Check out these resorts with beginner-friendly terrain parks.
Wisp Resort, Md.
Wisp has the first Burton Learn to Ride Center below the Mason Dixon. The Center has beginner-friendly equipment, certified instructors, and a specially designed progression park with scaled-down features, slower speeds, and signage with trick tips before each feature.
wispresort.com, or check out Base Camp for more information http://basecamp.blueridgeoutdoors.com/?p=2562
Silver Creek Area, W.Va.
Intrawest has added a new beginner park area to Robertson’s Run at Silver Creek (Snowshoe Mountain’s sister property) with ground-level features, tiny rollers, and fun banks of snow. Check into Snowshoe’s comprehensive beginner terrain park lessons as well.
snowshoemtn.com
Appalachian, N.C.
The French Swiss Ski College runs the beginner freeride programs at Appalachian Ski Mountain’s official Burton Learn to Ride Center. Just like the progressive park at Wisp, App’s program and terrain park are designed to progress new freeskiers and boarders safely and quickly through their first terrain park experiences.
appskimtn.com
