Carving

Snowboard carving creates fantastic sensations because you end up doing wild things like switching from a toe-side to a heel-side edge while your body is facing down the slope... or on the opposite turn, leaning back while you're facing up the mountain. See how I'm looking down the slope here but I'm on my toe-side edge. It feels wicked!

You learn to trust the edge grab to hold you and carry you *quickly* through each partial-circle path, and you learn fantastic body control and balance. So wild. I feel so lucky that my partner is so good at carving - it rubs off! This is him ripping it!

You know you're carving when there's a very defined curved line created by your snowboard as you're riding. The required edge grab occurs when you create a large enough angle of your board with respect to the mountain. This board edge angle means that your body has to be close to the mountain while you move through a circular C-shape. Your knees are bent and your upper body is parallel to the slope on toe-side and perpendicular to the slope on heel-side.

When your *turns* are also carved, then while you turn, you either maintain or increase your speed. This is different from skidded turns, which always reduce your speed. Combining the closeness to the mountain with the high speed and dance-like motions allows carving to make you feel one with with slopes and the snow in a way that's therapeutic unlike anything else that exists in this world. It feels like flying, but instead of jumping off of heights, you're putting in a lot of work to do it on the ground itself.

Eurocarving

Here's an unintentional attempt at a eurocarve that I did not manage to follow through with, but provides a great learning experience! It started with the very first picture at the top of the Carving section, which was an edge transfer wickedly early in the turn. Perfect set up for a eurocarve. Then, you get low. Really low, almost sitting down. But here's the first mistake I made. I'm a little too far tilted towards the front of my board. Good body position, but I could have put a little more weight on that back leg, which would have made my back knee more bent than my front knee.

Then I kind of save the weight balance issue and I extend my legs out and get really low, which is great. But, the issue is that I was not low enough. I should have extended my legs out all the way, and instead of my hands touching the snow, and I should have been touching the snow with my entire right forearm.

So what happens here is that my hands and my knees skid the snow and blow out the turn. This is all at high speed, so I would have needed to apply more *power* to push my legs out and bring my knees off the snow. Because my knees blew out the turn, I pretty much came to a stop, got up, and did a little backwards roll on the slope and got back on the toe-edge.

Woop! I'm going to keep trying to get that eurocarve down. One thing that might help psychologically is to just keep my arms bent so my hands are near my heart. That might make it easier to achieve the body position of getting all the way down to my elbow touching the ground, instead of my hands touching the ground.