I’ve been snowboarding for 15 years, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. That said, every time I go to the mountain, I see these funny-looking people holding walking sticks with two pieces of metal strapped to their feet, and I wonder if this ‘skiing’ might also be a fun activity.

Unlike a lot of people, I never learned to ski as a child. The closest I ever came was finding an old pair of skis in the basement, duct-taping them to my boots, and trying to run around outside with them. This was not as amusing to me as it may have been to my neighbors. I got right into snowboarding when I was in middle school in the resplendent mountains of the Poconos. Holler Seven Springs!

In my fifth year in Colorado, I finally started off a day with skis strapped to my feet. I borrowed my roommate’s skis and boots, and headed up to Beaver Creek with a few friends. I quickly learned that it isn’t as easy to go uphill in skis as I had thought. I find this disappointing because I want to take my skiing skills backcountry with a splitboard. To rub salt in my wounds, my friends ditched me because I was so slow in my first attempt to get on the ski lift. I wondered if skiing would immediately make me more of a nerd.

The next step was to head down a cat track. I thought I had the turning down until I was informed that I appeared to be driving a bus the way I turned my shoulders instead of my hips. The only other analogy to which I can equate it is someone who plays a racing game like MarioKart by turning their whole body rather than the controller and winds up looking like the village idiot. Nevertheless, my turning was a successful enough tact on the cat track. It was the next step that got me in trouble.

I never learned to hockey-stop. I could only stop by heading back up hill, and this only works where there is enough space and a slow enough pitch. The results were nearly disastrous. I went bombing down the mountain like a four-year-old miscreant, except that an adult male can probably kill someone like that. Of course, I was on the blue/green slopes where children were learning important skills like how to turn and stop, but I had no such education. I dodged in and out of blissfully ignorant whippersnappers (seems like something a skier would say) until I came to a shallow slope and turned back uphill. It was far easier to go uphill on skis with some real speed, and I ended up taking a detour through the trees. I think what saved me this entire time from hurting myself or others was an eerie comfort at high speeds and a mysterious ability to turn pretty well even though I could not actually stop.

After all that, I was basically a wreck for the rest of the day, employing the pizza technique as well as I could and avoiding all manner of innocent child, occasionally getting some speed up and careening off runs. So now that I have actually gone skiing, I am reading everything I can and talking to ski instructor friends about HOW I should be skiing.

Among the pieces of advice:

The hockey stop is not step one, more like step five. Before going into a full-on hockey, you need to learn to slide sideways. This just means you keep your skis perpendicular to the slope with your shoulders still parallel to the mountain. Once you can do this, the hockey stop just means applying more pressure to your edges and digging in.

Before even that step, you should be learning stem turns. Stem turns are where you keep your skis parallel as you traverse the slope, then going into a snow-plough when you turn your skis down the mountain to link into your next turn.

The ultimate trick though seems to be keeping your shoulders facing down the mountain at all times. A friend used an analogy of treating your hands like they are headlamps, with the headlamps always shining on the slope below you. This will keep your shoulders in line, so that you are forced to turn from your hips. Supposedly, this is what will stop me from hurtling down the mountain like a human avalanche next time. Best of luck to the rest of you next time I get out there.