THE HOP-OVER: CHANGING EDGES WITHOUT LOSING THE SLOPE

The Technique

1. **Read every left and right from the rider's point of view**, as in the sidehill lesson. Left board is the one under your left foot facing the bars. Do the sidehill lesson before this one, because the hop-over is a transition between two sidehills and it makes no sense until you can hold each of them.
2. **Understand the problem it solves.** You are holding a sidehill on the left edge, and you need to go the other way. The obvious answer is to drop the nose down the fall line, come around, and set up on the other edge. **That obvious answer costs you all your height**, puts you briefly pointing straight down a slope you chose to cross rather than descend, and on consequential terrain it is exactly the wrong direction to be committing. The hop-over changes edges roughly where you stand.
3. **What it is, precisely: a direction change on a sidehill where the machine comes off one edge and goes onto the other**, with the rider crossing to the opposite running board as it happens. That is the use we can support from the instruction we could verify. **You will hear it used loosely for hopping over a downed log or across a trench, and we could not find that usage supported anywhere**, so treat this lesson as being about edge changes and nothing else.
4. **The sequence, and the order matters.** You start from a held sidehill, wrong foot forward on the loaded board. **You unweight the machine**, which is a compress-then-extend through your legs rather than a pull on the bars. As it comes light, **you counter-steer the bars toward the new edge** exactly as in the turning lesson, because that is what makes the machine want to fall the other way rather than you having to lever it there. **Your feet cross to the other board as the machine passes through flat**, and you land into wrong foot forward on the new side. Then throttle brings the new edge up and you are holding a sidehill again in the opposite direction.
5. **The moment of maximum danger is the middle, when the machine is flat.** For that instant the sled has no edge in the snow, nothing is holding you on the hill, and gravity is doing what gravity does. **That is why the hop-over is a committed movement rather than a careful one.** Riders who go halfway, feel the machine go light and unedged, and then hesitate are the ones who end up sliding down the slope sideways with the sled on top of them. Decide before you start, then do all of it.
6. **Throttle through the transition, not before or after it.** Too little and the track has no bite to set the new edge, so the machine washes out downhill as it lands flat. Too much and it hooks up hard on the new edge and climbs across the slope faster than you wanted, which on a tight face means meeting whatever is above you. **The input is a deliberate roll of throttle through the movement**, matched to how far you need the machine to come across.
7. **Your eyes go where you are going, before the machine does.** Look across the slope in the new direction as you initiate, not down at the sled and not at the fall line. As with everything else on a sled, your head drags your shoulders and your shoulders set the edge, so looking down the hill during a hop-over is a very efficient way of ending up there.
8. **Practise it on a small pitch first, and practise it low.** The hop-over is a technique for steep committed faces, which is exactly why you must not learn it on one. Find a gentle slope with a clean runout where the failed version costs you nothing but a stuck sled and some digging, and do it until the crossing of the feet is automatic and you no longer hesitate at the flat point.
9. **The failure mode to expect, and it is nearly universal at first, is stalling at flat.** The rider unweights, gets the machine partway across, and their body arrives on the new board after the machine has already begun to fall. The fix is not more effort. **The fix is the counter-steer, because a machine that has been asked to fall the other way arrives on the new edge on its own** and your feet simply need to be there when it does. If it feels like heavy work, you are levering rather than asking, exactly like the flat ground drill in the turning lesson.

Common Mistakes

Hesitating at the flat point. Fix: decide before you start. The middle of a hop-over has no edge in the snow and is the one part of the movement you cannot pause in.

• Levering the machine over with body weight. Fix: counter-steer toward the new edge and let the machine fall there. If it is hard work, you have skipped the counter-steer.
• Feet arriving after the machine. Fix: the cross happens as the sled passes through flat, not once it has landed. Drill the footwork on gentle ground until it is automatic.
• Too little throttle through the transition, so the machine lands flat and washes downhill. Fix: roll the throttle through the movement, not before it and not after it.
• Looking down the fall line during the change. Fix: eyes go across the slope in the new direction before the machine does.
• Learning it on the terrain it is for. Fix: practise on a small pitch with a clean runout where failure costs a dig, not a slide.

The Drill

Linked hop-overs on gentle ground. On a low-angle open slope with a safe runout, hold a short sidehill on the left edge, hop over to the right edge, hold it, then hop back. The standard is six linked changes without dropping into the fall line once and without your height wandering. Count how many you complete before you hesitate at the flat point, and work that number up. When it is clean and unhurried on gentle ground, take it to a moderate face and no steeper.

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