Grays On Trays

Can you go snowboarding just a few degrees south of the equator? If you get enough altitude.

Martin Griff, a journalist who writes for several papers in New Jersey, relays a story told to him by a friend who traveled to Africa. Here’s an excerpt:

There are tourists everywhere at Kilimanjaro. Most of them are just looking and photographing the animals in the surrounding game parks but a few are there to climb and one of those potential climbers had a snowboard hanging on his backpack. Who could resist asking him what he had in mind?

He was in his mid-twenties and Swedish. He spoke little English and I speak no Swedish so our conversation was minimal but that snowboard did give us something in common. We were able to work out that he was trekking the Serengeti after finishing his education. He had found the snowboard in a junk shop in Dar es Salaam, knew he was on his way to Kilimanjaro, and figured why not.

You can read the full story on “Skiing & Snowboarding by Martin Griff” at NJ.com

With my own riding in the Midwest over, it’s time to travel to other places for some snowboarding. And if that doesn’t pan out, at least think about snowboarding somewhere else.

That somewhere else lately has been Japan. No, I’ve never been there, but it offers riders plenty of opportunities. Lots of resorts. Lots of snow. And lots of options.

So where do you start reading about what’s out there? One place is Snow Japan. It’s a hobby site that has grown a lot over the years, with forums, maps and other features I have yet to explore.

My favorite places for snowboarding are in the Rockies. But how about … Scotland? Yes, there’s a trade association called Ski Scotland that will tell you all about skiing in the land of kilts, bagpipes and haggis.

Not that I’d expect a Yank traveling across the ocean to hit the slopes go to Scotland rather than the Alps. But if your business needs send you to Glasgow or Aberdeen or if you’re fascinated by all things Scottish, why not.

You’ll immediately notice some differences from the U.S. For one thing, the trails or slopes are called “pistes,” which are colored in terms of easier to more difficult, go in this progression: green, blue, red and black. The bunny slope, as far as I can tell, is called the nursery. Ouch! Talk about wounding your pride!

You may be surprised to learn that the vertical drop is respectable, though not spectacular: 1,900 feet for the Nevis Range, for example.

But there’s one fact of these resorts that problem won’t appeal to U.S. riders: surface lifts dominate in Scotland.

Winter is getting underway in the southern hemisphere. On the Snow shows that resorts in Australia are developing a base, though if you click through to resort-specific information, you’ll find that precious little terrain is actually open. Expect things to be underway within two weeks.

Somebody in New Zealand recommended Mt Ruapehu, on North Island. I don’t know if it’s any good–it’s not in the On the Snow database, though oddly enough, there’s a story about it on the site’s front page for the country.

The site for Ruapehu is down at the moment, but take a look at the videos. There’s nothing unusual there. But one of them, in which the camera trails snowboarders down an open field of snow, is encouraging. Here in the northern hemisphere with a tight travel budget, it’s the best I’m going to get for a while.