EDGING AND TURNING: WHY YOU STEER RIGHT TO GO LEFT

The Technique

1. Every note about left and right in this lesson is from the rider's point of view, sitting or standing on the machine facing forward. Rider's left, rider's right. When we say the left running board we mean the board under your left foot as you face the handlebars. Read it that way throughout and none of it will be ambiguous.
2. **On hard snow, a sled turns the way every other vehicle you have ever driven turns.** On ice, on groomed hardpack, on wind crust, you turn the bars left to go left. Your weight goes to the inside of the turn, so for a left hand turn most of your weight is on the left hand side of the machine and the left running board. Throttle stays controlled and measured. **What is doing the work here is the carbides on the skis biting into the hard surface** and levering the machine around. Expect a little understeer, so it will run slightly wider than you asked for, but it goes broadly where you point it.
3. **In powder, that all inverts. To go left, you turn the bars right.** Then you give it a handful of throttle. The bars going right rolls the machine up onto its left edge, and once it is on edge the throttle decides everything: **the track claws the rear of the machine around in an arc, and how hard you are on the throttle sets how fast that arc comes around.** You are not steering the sled. You are setting it on edge and then driving the back end around with the track.
4. Understand why the hardpack technique cannot work in deep snow. **In powder the skis have nothing to bite.** Carbides need a hard surface to lever against, and they will not find one. Turn the bars into a deep snow corner and the skis simply plough, the nose pushes wide, and the machine goes straight on while you fight it. The mechanism you were relying on is not there, so you have to use the one that is, which is the track and the edge.
5. Now the drill that makes this land, and do it on flat ground before you go anywhere near a hill. **Stand on a stationary sled on the flat and try to rock it up onto one edge using your body weight alone.** You will heave. It takes a lot of huffing and puffing, a lot of weight thrown around, and for most people the machine barely comes up. Remember what that feels like.
6. **Then do exactly the same thing, but first turn the handlebars the opposite way to the edge you want.** The sled will want to fall onto that edge on its own. Add a chop of the throttle at the same moment and it flicks up onto edge with almost no effort from you. **That is the whole lesson in one movement**, and it is worth doing it back to back a few times so your body records the difference between fighting the machine and asking it.
7. **This is the difference between being completely buggered two hundred metres from the car park and riding all day, every day, for three weeks straight.** Riders who fight the machine burn out in the first hour and then spend the rest of the day getting the sled unstuck, which burns them out further. Riders who let the machine do it ride until the light goes. It is not fitness. It is technique, and the fitness only matters once the technique is right.
8. **Real snow is rarely one thing or the other, and this is where it gets interesting.** A single corner can start on wind crust, break through into soft, and finish on a firm base. So the honest answer is that you are constantly blending the two techniques, reading what is under you and shifting the balance between steering it and edging it. That blending is the actual skill, and it only comes from time on the machine in varied snow.
9. **Expect this to feel wrong for a while, because it is genuinely counterintuitive.** Steering right to go left contradicts everything from a bicycle to a car, and under pressure people revert to what they know. Almost every rider defaults back to the hardpack technique the first time a corner matters. That is normal, it is not a sign you are slow to learn, and the only fix is enough repetition that the powder response becomes the one that arrives without thinking.

Common Mistakes

Steering into a deep snow corner the way you would in a car. Fix: the skis have nothing to bite in powder. Turn the bars away from the turn, roll onto the edge, and let the track bring the back around.

• Muscling the sled onto its edge with body weight. Fix: turn the bars the opposite way first and add a chop of throttle. The machine will fall onto the edge on its own.
• Riding the powder technique on hardpack. Fix: on a hard surface the carbides work, so steer normally and keep the throttle controlled.
• Treating throttle as speed in a soft snow turn. Fix: once you are on edge, throttle is what pulls the rear of the machine around. It sets the rate of the turn, not just how fast you are travelling.
• Assuming a corner is all one snow type. Fix: read what is under you as you go. Most corners are a blend and you adjust through them.

The Drill

The flat ground edge test. On safe flat ground with the machine stationary, first try to lever the sled onto its left edge with body weight alone and note how hard it is. Then turn the bars to the right, add a chop of throttle, and feel it fall onto that left edge on its own. Repeat both sides until the difference is obvious. Then take it to a gentle open slope and link soft snow turns using bars away and throttle only, with no attempt to steer into the turn at all.

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