Can Snowboarders and Skiers Be Friends?

Brad and I were on a chairlift in Park City with an older couple — probably like 40 years old, so not “old” old, just older than either of us. Brad happened to be skiing that day instead of boarding, and both of the other people on the chair with us were skiing, too. About a third of the way up the line, the wife turned over to us and asked (in all seriousness) whether it was possible for skiers and snowboarders to be friends.

“Wait, you ski?” she said, gesturing at Brad, “And you snowboard?” this time pointing to me. “Can you be friends?”

This lady blew my mind. I just wanted to be like, “Look, it ain’t 1994 anymore, lady. Get with the program!” With that out of the way, she asked more 1990′s questions, like (and I kid you not!) “Why do snowboarders sit down all the time?” Brad has a slightly higher stupidity tolerance than I do, and he was able to explain the physics of snowboarding, and how a snowboarder can’t just “stop” and “stand” on the side of a run, like skiers can (and often) do.

But she really went overboard when she looked right at me and asked, “Be honest: have you ever run in to a skier before?”

No, ma’am. I’ve been snowboarding for about 15 calendar years and no, I’ve never run in to a skier. I’ve saved myself from some near misses (because a snowboard can almost always stop faster than skis) that would’ve been the other person’s fault. But I have never caused a collision. And I didn’t have the figures in front of me, she probably wouldn’t have listened, but the National Ski Area Association has no problem reporting Jasper Shealy’s research, which suggests that (get ready for this!)

Alpine skiers are three times more likely to be involved in a collision with other people than snowboarders.

So it’s not just “slightly” more likely. It’s waaaaay more likely that a skier will cause an accident. The fact of the matter is that you can put any idiot on a pair of skis, point them down the fall-line and teach them the pizza/french fries approach to slow-down/speed-up, and they can usually make it down the runs. Snowboarding, sure, takes a little bit more skill to master. My hypothesis is that the proportion of idiots on skis is far greater than the proportion of idiots on snowboards. Add the fact that snowboarders are capable of lower speeds, and capable of stopping much quicker than skiers (especially novice skiers), and I think the evidence will bear that in most ski/snowboard collisions, the skier is at fault.

Lucky me, on the last run of the day, I was nearly killed by one such idiot on skis, some pre-pubescent girl who decided to stop schussing down the run and make a perpendicular-to-the-fall-line traverse cut, right in front of me without checking for uphill traffic. But you know what… I’m OK. Was I really f*cking pissed about it? You bet. Did I want to ream someone? For sure. But the mom, I heard her telling the kid that “you totally cut that man off, go apologize to him!” and asking me if I was OK. I mustered something like, “Yeah, I think I’ll be fine” and when the girl apologized, I told her “Don’t worry about it, y’know, these things happen, it was an accident.”

I was just slightly more upset than I let on. But she was a kid, and it was an accident. But it was her fault…