TREES AND TECHNICAL TERRAIN
13 min · Full library · written lesson, video in production
After this lesson you can pivot a snowbike in its own length in deep snow, read gaps and hazards in tight timber, keep a machine alive where there is no room to build speed, and get a bike turned and pointed downhill in country too tight to ride it around.
The Technique
- Understand what the timber is asking for, because it is not what open country asks for. In the open, the currency is speed and commitment. In tight trees the currency is precision and machine placement, and speed is mostly unavailable. Every metre of your line is chosen, every turn is deliberate, and the margin for a sloppy input is roughly the width of your handguards. Riders who are fast in the open are often poor in the timber for exactly this reason. They have learned to solve problems with throttle and momentum, and neither is on offer. What is on offer is the ability to put the machine exactly where you intended, at low speed, repeatedly, without stopping.
- Read gaps by the widest part of the machine, which is the bars rather than the track. A snowbike will fit through gaps that look impossible because the track is narrow, and riders get seduced by that and then catch a handguard on a trunk at the worst possible moment. A bar snag in tight trees turns the machine instantly and violently, and it happens at the exact point where you have no room to correct. Measure gaps by bar width, allow for the fact that your line through the gap is almost never perpendicular to it, and remember that a gap taken at an angle is effectively narrower than it looks. When you genuinely need to squeeze, the technique is to enter square and let the machine pass through before you begin the next direction change.
- Look at the gap, never at the tree, and look further ahead than feels natural. Target fixation is a moto lesson you already know, but it has a different quality in timber where the obstacles are hard, immovable and closely spaced. Train yourself to look two gaps ahead rather than one, because at timber speeds the machine will be committed to the current gap long before you arrive at it, and the only useful information is where you are going next. Read the snow between trees as well. The snow near trunks behaves differently to the snow in the open. It is often softer, deeper and less supportive, tree wells form on the downhill side of large conifers, and buried deadfall sits at exactly the height that stops a ski. Assume the ground within a couple of metres of any large trunk is worse than what you have been riding.
- The pivot turn, momentum in tight timber, and turning a bike downhill where there is no room
- 5 more technique steps
- The 4 mistakes that undo it, with fixes
- The drill that builds the reflex
- The safety non-negotiables
It opens when you book a trip that runs snow biking - these are the exact drills you run with your coach out there. Your booking unlocks this whole library.
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