Snowboarding, much like sailing or driving, benefits greatly from speed. The greater the pressure on the various involved components (from the board all the way up to my legs), the greater the stability and amount of available control. I think most of it can be attributed to getting all of the parts into regions where their responses are linear—and that sort of thing doesn't happen when, for example, you're standing still quickly changing your balance back and forth to keep from falling down the hill.
The thing is that it's difficult to overcome the initial fears of snowboarding because they're so evident when working in that non-linear region. I'm slowly making that transition now, and as far as I can tell, it constitutes "getting it" far better than anything else I've seen so far.
So in case it wasn't obvious, I (and Layla and some friends) went boarding today. This was Layla's first time out there—and she was a real trooper for holding up as well and as long as she did. As should be clear from my introduction, I'm finally getting around to figuring this all out, although I'm still stuck on the Daisy lift.
The serious downside of going snowboarding today is that the mountain was mobbed. We showed up at around 10:30 and we got done with the equipment rental (usually a 20-minute process) a few minutes before a 1pm lesson. Ouch.
The picture at top is of the chair lift—yes, the Daisy chair. It's so loaded up that the chairs on the right hang a good ten feet below the return chairs, on the left. This picture doesn't even show the worst spot, which was a few seats behind us at that point.
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