Imagine you are flying towards a 50 ft park jump, when you hit the lip you go for a 720 mute grab. Or imagine carving down the face of a jagged mountain in the backcountry of Whistler Resort. There are many different types of snowboarding that all require different types of skills. In addition to the different types everyone has their own style of riding.

One type of snowboarding is back country riding This consists of boarders riding down unmarked mountains and all natural terrain. They ride what the mountains give them; they need no jumps, halfpipes, or rails to throwdown an awesome line of tricks down the mountainside. To get to the best spots they use snowmobiles, helicopters, and snowcats, a giant tractor-like machine with tracks like a tank, as methods of transportation. Some common features that are ridden a lot are cliff drop-offs, long runs through trees, and pillow tops, which are a bunch of boulders or stumps covered with a couple feet of snow that resemble a bunch of pillows bunched together. Back country riders do many of the same tricks that park riders do but they have one trick the park riders can’t do; the pow carve. A pow carve is when a rider is cruising down the mountain and they turn sharply spraying snow everywhere. The reason they can do this is because there is usually over 7 ft of snow that they are floating on so when they dig in it sends snow flying.

Another type of snowboarding is park riding. This type of riding consists of hitting jumps, rails, boxes, halfpipes, quarterpipes, and other manmade features. Most contests are in park format and the riders choose different line, or tricks over multiple features in one run. Most tricks in park are either flips, spins, grabs, or any combination of any three. The tricks that snowboarders do can be used for both park and back country but they are used more in park riding. This is because park riding is all about the tricks you do, as where back country is about shredding the natural terrain.

Snowboard racing is also a type of snowboarding but it requires totally different skills. There are different kinds of snowboarding racing which consist of slalom snowboarding and boarercross. Slalom snowboarding is where one boarder goes at a time around a course without any jumps, trying to get the fastest time. Boardercross is a race downhill with jumps against 3 or 4 other racers. Snowboard racing is all about speed; no tricks are performed during a race.

Those are the three main types of snowboarding. They are all unique in their own ways and all require different skills. Everyone has their own unique style of riding different types of terrain. Also there are people who specialize in only one type of snowboarding.