Charlie Winterton primed his charges to keep their hands forward and their weight centered and then, at the precise moment, to explode off the snow-covered 6-foot-high ramp for some “really big air.”
Then, one after another, helmeted skiers as young as 9 launched themselves into space as the Keystone ski instructor cheered.
“Ten years ago,” said ski school director Chris Heidebrecht, “you would have had your pass pulled for showing the bottoms of your skis.”
Now the resorts are teaching it.
Breaking with traditional teaching standards, ski areas across Colorado are offering lessons on handling the extreme steeps, the massive jumps and the slick, dangerous rails of the terrain parks. Meanwhile, the industry as a whole is struggling to catch up with the bold new wave of “free-ride” instruction.
“The kids are going to do this stuff anyway,” Heidebrecht said. “We might as well teach them the right way, so they can be safe.”
Nearby, teens on snowboards are attempting dizzying spins and acrobatics in the two-second flights off the resort’s bigger ramps–the type that have contributed to fatal accidents in the past, even at Keystone, a mountain once renowned as a beginner’s paradise.
These days at “Keystone University,” advanced skiers and snowboarders are flocking to courses that lead them to competition-level stunts such as 360s, switch (backward) takeoffs and landings, and riding kinked and curved rails.
It’s such a new area and philosophy, however, that not even the Professional Ski Instructors of America, the national sanctioning body that has been the last word on ski instruction, has developed standardized curriculum for it.
“They understand the need as much as we do,” said Pete Sonntag, director of the Copper Mountain ski school. “You’re not going to be able to move as quickly when you’re trying to reach a common understanding across all the resorts in Colorado or across the country. There’s a lot of politics involved and making sure everyone’s voice gets heard, and then, eventually, a policy goes forward. It can be a bit cumbersome at times. From a business standpoint, though, we can’t always wait for something to become mainstream.”
Steve Over, executive director of the PSIA, acknowledged that resorts have led the way on the new-school instruction but resists the notion that the organization known for teaching perfect, if somewhat boring, technique is too conservative to embrace the latest styles.
“It’s just the nature of the beast that we’re going to be a little behind the times,” he said, noting that many crazes on the slopes, such as monoboarding, never really catch on, making investing in brand-new programs initially risky.
Over recalled being at the trade show when Burton introduced its first snowboards to the skepticism of skiing traditionalists. He suggested that the PSIA would have been ridiculed if it had rushed off to create a new curriculum for the budding sport.
Still, it was several years after snowboarding had overtaken the country as the redeeming youth movement of the stagnant ski industry before PSIA spun off a separate organization, the American Association of Snowboard Instructors, to acknowledge its separate but increasingly equal status with skiing.
“PSIA was criticized for being late to the altar on that,” Over said. “We were criticized for being late to the altar with shaped skis. You have to remember that that’s inherent in the nature of a national organization, particularly when a new device happens, like snowboarding. There are a lot of new things that come out that will never see the light of day.”
Offering the new-school courses is an effort by the ski areas to retain intermediate and advanced skiers and snowboarders who often reach plateaus in their learning but are reticent to spend a day on the slopes finding new challenges in ski-school classes.
At Keystone, though, specific techniques can be acquired, a la carte, in as little as two hours.
“It’s more like a learning session and not quite a lesson,” Heidebrecht said. “It’s set up differently than a beginner lesson, where there’s a lot of command style and teaching new things.
“This takes someone’s performance and gives them that little extra that lets them ski what they want to ski.”
Resorts are even toying with semantics to attract those who would disdain ski school, referring to the lessons as “clinics” or “sessions” rather than “classes.”
One risk to the approach, instructors have acknowledged, is creating specialists incapable of basic tasks–snowboarders, for example, who are brilliant in the air off the big jumps but who can’t carve a simple turn or negotiate an ungroomed slope.
But that, they say, is far preferable to the “huck and hope” approach used in the informal school of hard knocks typically embraced by the terrain-park culture.
“In that world,” Heidebrecht said, “the crashing and hard falls are supposed to be a part of the learning curve. But unfortunately, a lot of those younger kids–and a lot of the older kids like myself–don’t bounce back from those injuries as well. We’d like to teach them in a less painful way.”
