Patience For Powder Skiing - Tips and Tactics for Skiing Fresh Snow.

Everybody loves skiing powder. Okay, everybody loves the idea of skiing powder, but many actually find it a struggle. Here's a few tips. Try to twist your skis as little as possible. Pivot with precision. Only twist your skis as much as you need to. Any abrupt redirection of the skis across your momentum, without a whole lot of anticipatory inclination, will almost certainly result in a face plant. Aim for a round arc, C-shaped rather than Z-shaped. Soft snow is great for bending the skis, so try and have the tails follow the tips as much as you can. It'll make for a much smoother ride. Bend them. Powder bends your skis a lot, so take advantage of this self-steering effect and allow your tails to follow your tips as much as possible. It's kind of like riding a berm or a luge track that tilts with the turn. A ski traveling forward through the snow in this fashion makes for a much smoother and more predictable ride than a ski traveling sideways. Stay centered, but not grounded. In an effort to avoid chicken plucking and face planting, people have a natural tendency to lean back and powder and crud. Of course, this causes the tails to sink into the snow and the skis nearly impossible to steer. The result is one of our favorite symptoms, loss of speed control, otherwise known as jet skis. Regardless of what your brother-in-law tells you, aim to balance through the middle of the skis with pressure directly through the bottom of your feet. Keep in mind, your skis are going to slow down as they sink into the snow. So centered may mean that your feet will be a little more in front of you, just not so far in front that you're on the tails. You'll have to keep the feet moving in order to maintain balance. When your skis bounce out of the snow between turns, your feet will want to take off. Rein them in by pulling them back underneath your body. Just get ready to push them ahead again as soon as you plunge back in. So especially when it's heavy, seek out little terrain features like bumps and wind drifts that'll help you get your skis out of the snow. Still having twisting troubles? Then get off the ground and get some air. If you're patient enough with the pressure, push off that platform. Or better yet, let it push you and get your skis out of the snow. Now you'll be able to redirect them before plunging back in. Rhythm is your friend. Bounce to the rhythm. Rhythmical turns will help you take the energy from one turn into the next. You'll be bouncing right out of the snow. Speed is your friend. When you sink into that soft powder, it will slow you down, which is great if that's what you want to do. Unfortunately, if you're going too slow, you will not be able to float to the surface between turns, and this will make it very difficult to initiate a direction change. Take a more aggressive line, keeping your skis in the fall line a little longer than you would in harder conditions. Powder is already grippy, maybe too grippy. We don't need our edges to bite the snow. We need our bases to compress the snow. To build a broader platform, you may want to take a more two-footed approach. I still like to balance primarily through the outside ski, but use a little muscular effort to pressure the inside ski and compress the snow. This will give you something to stand on and keep that outside ski from diving and straying. You may also want to narrow it up a little bit. A lot of ski instructors preach a wide stance on groomers, which may be more stable, but narrowing your stance a bit in powder can help keep your skis from having a mind of their own. Patience is key for powder. It takes time for that snow to compress under your weight, so wait for it. Extend your legs as your feet plunge into the snow, and keep that outside leg long and strong until the snow decides to push back. The key is being patient. You won't get a reaction right away like you will in hard snow, but it'll come eventually. Good things take time. Steep terrain will help you keep the momentum. I said before, powder will slow you down, so ignore your instincts. The steeper the terrain, the more momentum, and the easier it will be to ski. Skiing powder is just like skiing bumps, except you're making the bumps as you go. Fat skis are a nice luxury, but don't let skiddy skis stop you. If you want to make life easy in bottomless powder, you can always get yourself a pair of fat skis. Fat skis create a bigger platform and help you float on top of the snow, making the skill set required much closer to that of skiing a groomed run. And the skis drift much easier. They're awesome for arcing big rooster tail turns and wide open bowls. For even more float and easy turn initiation, you can try a pair of skis with reverse camber or rocker at the tip and tail. They sure are a lot of fun, and have opened up a whole new world of carving and slarving possibilities in deep snow. That said, when the snow is light and fluffy, in tight spaces and on steeper terrain, I still crave the old-school powder experience of sinking in and bouncing out of the white stuff on the skinny skis. It certainly requires better balance and a little more momentum, but the face shots are plentiful.