Because skiers go so fast, they need enormous amounts of terrain, with the biggest ski resorts, such as Whistler in British Columbia, covering up to 12 square miles. So famous ski resorts tend to track back to the pre-environmentalism days when some visionary entrepreneur could talk the Forest Service into giving him a permit for Mammoth Mountain or wherever without a lot of costly environmental impact studies.
A secret of snowboarding is that snowboards don’t go as fast as skis, so they don’t need as much room, which makes them a better fit for today’s high land prices and environmental restrictions.
Another secret is that snowboarders fall down more than skiers, so snowboarding is best for teens who feel no pain. So that makes snowboarding seem cool, even though, objectively, it’s not as thrilling as going fast on skis.
Snowboarding is kind of like if teens had invented a soft golf ball that doesn’t go very far so they could use their drivers on cheap little pitch and putt golf courses instead of on increasingly outlandishly expensive full-size golf courses…and still make it seem cool.
That actually would be a good thing if somebody ever did it for golf.
It’s especially too bad that Chinese golfers in the 1980s fell in love with whomping a regular golf ball regular distances. If Deng Xiaoping were as wise as his admirers claim, he would have required a soft golf ball that only goes the length of a football field and thus golf courses in China would be only 1/4th as big. But instead, the Chinese went with the standard golf ball, which is not a good fit for densely populated China. So you see headlines out of China like, “800 Evicted Farmers Battle 200 Club-Wielding Bandits Hired by Mayor and Golf Course Developer.”
