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Sunday, March 19, 1995 Page: 11C
Now is the time to snowboard
The unseasonably warm weather the past week may have convinced you that the
ski season is over, but don’t desert the mountain just yet. This is a perfect
time to try snowboardingIf you haven’t given it a shot yet, the soft snow and
absence of ice found on the slopes this time of year makes it a great time to
learn. And don’t think that snowboarding isn’t for you because your head isn’t
shaved or your nose isn’t pierced.
You don’t have to look the look to be a snowboarder. Just ask Gordon
Robbins, the white-haired, 53-year-old Snowboard Supervisor at Okemo Mountain
Resort in Ludlow, Vt. Robbins, whose nickname is “Grandpa Shred,” may not look
the part, but he’s one of the most prominent snowboarders in the country.
“I don’t mind the nickname,” says Robbins, who lives with his wife, Claude,
in Bondville, Vt. “I think it’s great. It’s fun to bank off the white hair.”
Whether it’s his high profile or the fact that he was part of the first
wave of snowboarders eight years ago, Robbins has become a leader of the
“shredding” (shredding is slang for snowboarding) community.
Besides running the snowboard instruction programs for Okemo’s ski school,
he is chairman of the Professional Ski Instructors’ Association (PSIA)
snowboard committee. He also writes a column for “Snoboard Magazine.”
Robbins took up snowboarding because it looked like a sport he would enjoy
and could pick up easily. He’d been heavily involved in wind surfing as a
trainer, competitor and organizer of Olympic-style competitions.
“I saw somebody doing it (snowboarding), and it seemed like a motion I
could relate to,” recalls Robbins, who is a professional sculptor during the
off-season. “I had to teach myself, and the first time I went out it was in
the spring on soft snow. It seemed pretty easy.
“But then my wife gave me a board the next Christmas, and I went out in
January on `bulletproof’ ice. That hurt. It wasn’t fun. I was very much still
learning.”
Robbins says that snowboarding is easier to learn than skiing, although it
can seem awkward the first couple of times you’re strapped to a board. “It’s a
weird sense of balance,” he says, “that takes some getting used to. But you
get quite a bit better quite a bit faster than on skis.
“The first experience is never great, so you have to have some desire to do
it. But you become more proficient more quickly. Your legs can’t scissor like
they can with two big skis attached to your feet, and you don’t have any poles
to get in the way.
“The first lesson, you don’t right away say, `This is cool.’ You spend a
lot of time falling. But it becomes a challenge for a lot of people, and the
average person can pick it up in three two-hour lessons.”
Robbins says he sees a lot more average people taking up snowboarding now.
He has seen reports calling snowboarding the fastest growing sport in the
country, and says the number of snowboard lessons requested at Okemo seems to
double every year.
He says he’s seen a big change in the kind of people taking those lessons,
too.
“Maybe we’ve already taught all the teenage boys,” he jokes. “Now we’re
getting their girlfriends and their parents.
“The sport is maturing; there’s no doubt about it. The bad-boy, rebel side
of snowboarding — the idea that it’s only for grunge kids — is disappearing.
The fact that it’s a great, fun way to come down the mountain probably has
more to do with the growth than advertising or imagery.
“I don’t think people are taking it up because of what they’ve seen in the
press,” he continued, “since most of the press is negative. It’s growing
because somebody went out and enjoyed it so much that they told somebody else
about it. Or because they watch somebody doing it and it just looks like so
much fun.”
If you take a couple of lessons, as Robbins suggests, the learning curve
required to have that kind of fun can be relatively painless. Robbins also
insists that snowboarding can be every bit as safe as skiing, both for the
participants and for skiers sharing the mountain with them.
And he says that once skiers give snowboarding a shot, there might be a lot
less of them on the slopes. Robbins is convinced that snowboards, while
inherently slower than skis, provide their riders with more ways to enjoy a
mountain.
Right now is the best time to see if he’s right.
Scott Wasser is Assistant Managing Editor of The Times Leader. Ski Scene,
written by Wasser and Outdoors Editor George Smith, appears on Sunday.
At 53 years old, Gordon Robbins has earned the nickname `Grandpa Shred.’