How to Ride Slushy Snow

hey guys malcolm moore here thank you for joining me it's the end of the season which means the snow is melting rapidly and that is giving us these soft slushy conditions now riding slush can be really good fun on a snowboard but if you don't have the right technique or just the right idea of what kind of turns you're trying to make it can be really difficult and you'll end up having a miserable time let's take some turns and let's get into this tutorial [Music] we're at it so super soft thick heavy soupy slush now i mentioned in the intro that yeah you want to have good technique but you want to have the right tactics as well and what i mean by that is that you're making the right choices and simply put you just need to visualize a nice smooth s-shaped turn okay and you want to always be following the nose of your board that might sound quite simple and you might think you're doing that anyway but if you're making skidded turns you're essentially turning the board sideways therefore you're not following the nose and the reason that whilst you can get away with that on a nice smooth green piece you don't want to be doing that in the slush is because when you ride slush you get this quite unique feeling let me just stand up here and put some pressure through my board so i'm literally just standing on my board there let me just pull pull back away from that you can see underneath the board i've moved all the snow i've compressed it into a platform and that's why people say it's a bit like surfing when you're riding slash because it's less that you're balanced on your edge you're more on the base of your board compressing the snow underneath you and building a platform and that's really fun to ride and this platform actually gives you grip and kind of pushes back against you as you're riding down the slope but it only works if you're following the nose of the board if i start skidding the ball going sideways you hop off that platform and you see a lot of people when they start riding slash they start juddering and bouncing in this slushy snow and it's because they're not holding their line they're not traversing the board across following the nose that they're essentially falling out of that platform that they've built for themselves and then doing that down the piste so let's get on to what you need to do to be able to hold that line and make those smooth s shapes down the slope [Laughter] but you can actually see what happens if you do end up skidding if you do end up side slipping you kind of push all this snow down and then you kind of fall off the top of it so what do we need to do to get out of this skidded turn into a clean traverse where i'm following the nose of your board well it's just going to come down to having good technique and i don't want to go over too much of that in this video but if you're doing things like counter rotating like there you're going to push the board into a skid so you want to make sure you're not doing that you want to be able to move laterally laterally that is inclining into the slope to increase the edge angle of your board and also playing with the vertical movements a little bit of up and down sinking down low onto your edge and standing up to release the pressure at the end of the edge change or dropping down and doing a down and weighted turn both of those are going to work in the slush but to just get the basics right to be able to create that smooth s shape one of the best things you can do is actually learn to carve i'll link my sort of basics of eight steps to getting towards carving video or nine steps i don't know how many it was up in the top there so give that a watch but sometimes honestly just visualizing that s-shaped turn i teach a lot of people that are skidding and i just say hey rather than skidding at the end of the turn just traverse across across the slope look out over your leading shoulder and suddenly that's you know sometimes the only input they need to start creating these turns and when you make those turns once you are leaving that smooth shape in the snow lack of this such a nice feeling because of the snow moving underneath you kind of skidded that last one out there just to come to a stop but let me try and create this platform put the camera behind you can see it really leaves a trace a track in the snow behind you that you can push out against and it gives you rebound from one turn to the other as soon as you go into a skid let me just get over the top of this roller as soon as i turn the board sideways oh you really end up feeling all the little bumps underneath you rather than the nose of your board softening and squishing the snow and then your front leg and then your rear leg going over it when you hit everything with both feet at the same time like that it's just going to be much more hard work on your legs which is why you can get really fatigued riding slash so the long and short of it is that if you already have good technique you shouldn't have too many difficulties transferring those skills into slushy soft snow and as i mentioned i'm not going to go too much into that i'll put a bunch of links in the description down below on things like good posture knee steering carving as i mentioned before all that stuff you can check those videos out if you need to dial in your technique but once you have that what i want to talk about now is the one thing that's more unique to riding powder and very quickly before i get on to that i just want to give all you guys a big thanks for this season whether you've just been watching my videos you can give me a thumbs up or especially those of you that have actually come out here to outdoors in france and been having lessons with me it's been such a busy busy season it's been awesome and on that subject thinking already about next winter i'm not going to be teaching as much i'm going to be taking not time off but making sure i have time to make more videos because it's been a little bit of a struggle this season when i've been teaching until sort of 4 30 and then trying to make videos in the very last light of the day when i've been teaching six seven days a week so going into next year i'm not going to be as busy teaching more time making videos that does mean if you're interested in having lessons i'm already starting to get booked up january is almost sold out so get in there quick if you want to do that but now back on to riding slush so we know we want that good turn shape we want to be following the nose of your board and yeah i'm cheating a little bit today if you have a big powder board with a massive nose like this cool dude pryboard that i've been riding that's gonna help because you want your nose to hit everything first that essentially is lifting you up on the top of the slash and it's starting this process of what i call building a platform as the nose of your board let me get it on the snow here as it starts to come across the piece and you're putting pressure through it it's starting to compress you can see it already a little bit there compress the snow and build this platform your front knee when it gets really really sort of thick porridgey slush i go a little bit less weight on my front foot this doesn't mean that i'm not using it i'm still rolling my front foot over the board every edge change using my knee as a lever the video for that that movement is down in the description below as well really important one you want to have in all your turns i'm still using that front knee to make the edge change but i'm not putting much pressure through my foot the analogy i like to use imagine you've got like a bug under your front foot you don't want to squish it but you don't want to release it either not sure what kind of hell that bug's living in but you're trying to keep in there under your foot alive not squashed and not released so front foot's still working a bit of pressure through there that's going to compress the snow even more and then finally by the time you've got to your back foot you know this point in the snow my nose hits it there my front foot hits it there by the time my back foot has made it to that point the board your front foot everything it's done quite a good job of already compressing this snow and now you get this sensation where you're not so much riding on your edge but you're riding on this platform this ledge that you've built up and this is where being able to carve really helps you with riding slash because if you're already used to that sensation of getting the board rocket rocketing across the slope like that you're going to stay on top of this ledge and it's going to basically push back at you and give you grip if in your normal turns on the piste you're losing that grip with the back foot the board's sliding away then that's what we don't want to happen you're going to skip off that platform off that ledge in the snow and you're not going to get that smooth surfy feeling so what i would do i would just start off on like an easy-ish green slope somewhere that you're not going to have trouble making bigger turns and just get used to that feeling of following the nose and without putting in anything else you'll start to get that feeling of building that ledge underneath your board it feels really good don't rush the edge changes don't flick the back end of the board out because you want to try and build that platform as soon as you can early in the turn so now this is where we could start to be a little bit more aggressive with it once you've made the edge change if you sink yourself down into a lower position you can progressively push out against the board throughout the turn to compress that platform lost my words for a minute there you can press the snow underneath you a bit faster than say you are just being a bit more passive and just leaning into this into the turn and this is like a fine-tuning kind of balancing act if you kick your legs out too much if you extend your legs too much throughout the turn you're gonna break that platform and you're gonna fall through it but if you get it right it really compresses underneath you and that's when you get the sensation of it pushing back against you now if you've watched some of my videos on up unweighted or down unweighted turns also called high crossover or low cross underturns don't need to worry too much about the terminology that's basically about whether you're dropping down at the edge change or standing up at the edge change they can both work in the slush but a down unweighted turn allows you to be just slightly more aggressive because in a down unweighted turn you're sinking down low as you cross your knees over the board as you make your edge change straight away at the start of the turn you can then push out compress this snow underneath you coming round here i am at the end of my toe side turn built that platform built that ledge and i just release the pressure drop down low ready to start pushing out on my heels throughout the turn building that platform and if you do go too much you can just style it out it's quite fun actually to kick your back foot out sometimes and you make that big big spray of slush it feels a bit like you're making a turn on a wave you kind of spray that slush away and no one knows that you messed up all right so have a watch of some more footage guys but the key riding slashes once you have that smooth s shape those carve-like turns it's pretty easy and then you can start getting more aggressive with your vertical movements getting lower at the edge change and pushing out and round through the turn and getting that real fun snap and response from the board as it pushes into the platform that ledge of snow that you've created and it's easy to check you can always look back up the slope and you'll see if you've left that nice clean line in the snow or it's a big fat dirty one okay thank you for watching hope this helps you guys i know it's the end of the season a lot of you might already be finished but if you are save this for next time that you get some slushy conditions and get out there and enjoy [Music] so [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Malcolm Moore

Views: 12,696

Keywords: malcolm moore, malcolm moore snowboarding, riding slush, how to snowboard slushy conditions, how to ride slush, spring snowboarding

Id: PB5xP033gpA

Length: 15min 29sec (929 seconds)

Published: Wed May 11 2022