For me, having thought about and experienced how well an 8" wheel does in slightly long grass or mud (and for that matter frosted grass), the chances of mountainboarding in fresh snow being much fun were pretty low. Mind you, if the snow's compacted it's lots of drift-ey fun and a probably a good excuse to go and introduce my mountainboard to the snow. Luckily, in the way FRANK tells it - soft drugs lead to hard drugs- getting into Mountainboarding has lead me to a love of snowboarding. That's not to say I have crossed over to the white side, I'm very much a rider of the Earth, but there is nothing better than spending a week or so sliding down foreign snowy mountains. Of course the other great thing is you know as long there is snow on a surface then you can ride on it. Which, no matter what we think as mountainboarders, we can't ride on everything...

The thing about snowboarding is if you have fly to the mountains at the height of the tourist season. As well as buying lift passes and tech' clothing on top of sorting yourself a board, bindings and boots, it all adds up and turns out to be pretty expensive for what really will only be 2 weeks a year if you want to keep down a 'proper' job. I don't have that experience with my mountainboard: just wake up in the morning, peer outside to see what the weather is doing, throw out some texts to see who's about and head out and ride.
Now if there is snow on the ground there is only one thing to do and that's a quick binding swap and head out with me snowboard instead, right tools for the job and all that. Because at the end of the day it's hard to beat the floaty, flowing feeling you get from carving about the powdery goodness of fresh snow.

So there it was, a combination of recent unemployment and Britain being exposed to a proper winter for about a week. My days worked out like this: every afternoon to refresh my brain from filling in job applications, I would head to a hill just up the road from my house to what felt what my own private snowdome for some fresh tracks.

After a week it was just beginning to looked tracked out. There is a certain amount of pride in spending a week working along the slope to look back and think 'cool, look at all those tracks and a fresh line every time'.  To top it off the next week started off with a fresh dump of snow and another evening was spent carving fresh lines into Johnny's Stash, Sweet, then it rained and the snow melted over for another year (possibly).

Still at least I have got the trusty NoSno (for that's exactly what it says on the board) for the other 50 weeks of the year ;)

Having been born with closet geek tendencies, we thought nearly 2ft of snow was the perfect chance to end the age old question '...so is it like snowboarding?'. Plus if i hadn't found something else to quench my buzz thirst, my old Peugeot was gonna need new driveshafts... We'd always dreamed of having enough snowfall to be able to ride the local beacon hill but we had enough here to ride some of our sweetest mountainboard spots. I had to work in the morning and it was still snowing. I was going mental with excitement.

When we finally arrived the snow was perfect. Acres and acres of virgin snow covering the whole area. Some of the gradients there are pretty steep and even though I haven't ridden snow in 2 years and hadn't padded up, we headed to some of the steeper parts, usually where you'd end the day (one way or another) when out on wheels. I guess Snow gives you that security and as holding an edge is easier on a gradient, you've also got more control. We found a nice cornered run and sessioned it for a bit but it was pretty short. Snowboarding suits longer runs as it's smooth and flowy.

By using one snowboard to pile snow against another board we built a ridable 1ft jump in about 2 mins and hit that a few times for a giggle, if only it was that easy with dirt!

Getting air is also a bit weird if you come from a mountainboard background. There are no trucks on a snowboard and therefore, any pop has to come form the tail or nose of the board. A snowboard can slide in any orientation, sideways, backwards, it doesn't care as long as its going downhill, the wheels roll in every direction so to speak, it's all controlled by making slight changes in your centre of gravity, the heavy end of the package wants to lead. This also means you can't push off the wheels when getting rotations, it all has to come from the upper body. Once you get the hang of this and then go back to wheels, your riding will be on a whole different level.

We moved further on to hit some longer trails, there was so much to choose from. If you couldn't find a path that went the way you wanted, you could just ride over the top of the low scrub and link up with paths further down. That's another one up for the waxed-up tray! It just opened up so many possibilities. Walking was so much harder through the snow, and with the extra clothing layers, walking gets you pretty sweaty. Then as as soon as you stop it freezes and you're cold. I'd much rather be mountainboarding in hot weather, it's a lot nicer. The Maccy D's drive-thru on the way home soon fixed the shivers ;)

Finally the snow bubble burst and we were back on dirt whether we liked it or not. We returned to the same spots with the mountainboards and the first thing I noticed was how much better I was, that short session had sharped me right up. As soon as we hit the first hill you were reminded just how smooth the ride is on snow and just how less squeeky: my mountainboard squeeks ;o).

Trying to get my head around the differences in the ride was hard. We didn't start from so high on the runs this time. It was bumpier and the tracks seemed much narrower now the scrubby run offs would jam the wheels pretty quickly, and I also had less fine control. Even so, I felt more confident holding a line and we were finishing further down the runs than we had on snow, quite why I'm not sure. They're very similar and very different too, the same can be said for the terrain, once it's covered on snow, it might as well be another place.

Check out all the Dirt Monkey photos in the 'before & after' exhibition...