My Journey With Snowskating

A tale of my time in the snowskating community (so far).

Snowskate. Snowskating. The easiest way to describe what this is comes from my own spell checker. Right now both of the first two words of this paragraph are underlined in red. This indicates that the spell checking program has no knowledge of these words.

The same can be said of most people when they hear these words. Usually speaking them out loud results in basic questions like: “What?” and “What is that?”. After brief explanation people are generally still confused. “How exactly does it work?” and “So it’s like a small snowboard?”.

For me, snowskating has played a large part in my life. Which is odd considering 99.8% of the human population has no concept of what it even is. I began snowskating around 2005–2006 with no knowledge of its existence. I accidentally found myself inside an existing industry.

You see I had an idea, a simple idea. What if I took the trucks off of my skateboard and rode it in the snow? It would be like those toy snowboards you could ride on sledding hills, but better! Needless to say, it worked (sort-of). Through the power of the internet, I soon realized there was a whole industry with the same idea but on a much higher caliber.

After a few years I began to pursue making an online community focused around snowskating. At the time, the idea centered around being able to collaborate and share good spots to snowskate. It eventually evolved into product listings, blog posts, media, the list goes on. The site gained some traction and even had minor advertising at its peak.

Bear in mind: I was a mediocre (at best) snowskater and knew absolutely no other snowskaters in real life. Zero. Hell, I still only know about 2 and we haven’t spoken in years.

Now picture a community in its growing stages. Think about skateboarding or snowboarding before they became popular. Awkward explanations, skeptical outsiders, tight knit inside groups (aka: the hardcore riders). That is what snowskating was when I entered the community and, unfortunately, that’s what it still is. Instead of growing, it feels like it reached its peak about 2–3 years ago.

Here’s some reasons why I think that happened:

1. The sport falls into a sort of “middle-ground” between other board sports. Crossing between a skateboard, snowboard, and even a surfboard at times it never quite fits in properly.

2. There is a multitude of different types of snowskates. All designed for different conditions, riding terrain, and rider preference. All sharing the same title of “snowskate”.

3. There is a plethora of poorly constructed, cheap snowskates still being sold. Think of “Walmart” skateboards but much, much worse.

4. It’s hard to start snowskating without a background in other board sports. Not impossible, just more difficult.

5. It’s still expensive. In most cases people are just not willing to spend the amount of money that well constructed snowkskates currently cost.

In my opinion, the most important thing that this community still lacks is resources for new riders. Anyone even mildly interested in snowskating would have a hard time learning even the basics using the resources available to them at this time.

That is why, as an industry outsider-now-insider (sort-of) I am taking up an initiative on helping people understand snowskating. I am hoping to focus on that for the next few months and see where it goes.

Who knows, maybe one day my spell checker will understand.