THE SIDEHILL, PERFECTED

The Technique

1. Stop thinking of the sidehill as a manoeuvre and start thinking of it as a resting state. A sled on edge in deep snow is not fighting gravity, it is floating on the pressure it builds under the track paddles and the inside of the tunnel. When you get it right the machine sits still under you and the throttle hand does almost nothing. Every rider who struggles with sidehilling is treating it as a thing they hold, an act of muscular effort against a machine that wants to fall downhill. That rider gets about eighty metres before their forearms give out. The rider who has it right could sit on that same slope until the tank runs dry. The whole lesson below is about getting to that second state, and the road there runs through foot position, not arm strength.
2. Wrong foot forward is the single mechanical key, and it is worth being precise about what it means. If you are traversing left to right across a slope with the hill on your left, your downhill foot is your right, and your uphill foot is your left. Wrong foot forward means your uphill foot goes forward on the running board, up near the front of the board, and your downhill foot goes back, sometimes right back to the rear of the board or off the back of it entirely. It feels wrong because your body ends up rotated away from where you are looking, hips open to the downhill, chest turned up the mountain. Nearly every rider's instinct is the opposite: to put the downhill foot forward and hug the machine. That instinct puts your mass over the front of the sled and inside the turn, which drives the skis down and pulls you off the hill. The whole reason wrong foot forward unlocks this skill is that it puts your weight behind the ski pivot point and above the track, and it frees the uphill knee to drive into the seat or the side of the tunnel, which is the actual steering input.
3. Counter-rotation is what holds the line. Your lower body and the machine point one way, along the fall line or slightly down it, while your upper body points the other, up and across the slope. The twist between those two is stored energy, and it is what lets you correct the sled's attitude in either direction without touching the bars hard. Watch a strong rider on a long sidehill and the bars barely move. What is moving is the chest and the shoulders. Turn the shoulders further up the hill and the sled comes up on edge harder and climbs. Let the shoulders come back square and the sled drops its edge and falls off downhill. That is your altitude control, and it is smooth and analogue in a way that bar input never is. Learn to feel the amount of twist in your torso as a readout of how hard you are edged.
4. Now the running boards. Your weight does not sit evenly on them, and it does not sit on the middle of them. The uphill running board carries almost nothing. The downhill board carries you, and specifically the ball of your downhill foot near the rear of the board carries you, because that is where you can push down and drive the track edge into the slope. When people say "weight the downhill side" they are describing a load path: your mass goes through the outside of the track, the snow packs under that edge, and the packed snow is the shelf you are riding on. Push through the arch of your foot, not the toe. Keep the downhill leg long and loaded and the uphill leg soft and bent. The uphill knee is not carrying weight, it is a lever, pressed against the seat or tunnel to hold the sled's roll angle.
5. Throttle is your balance, and this is the part strong amateurs get almost right and therefore never fix. Throttle is not speed on a sidehill. Throttle is lift. More throttle spins the track faster, the paddles bite and throw more snow, and the machine climbs and rolls further onto its edge. Less throttle and the track loses its shelf and the sled slides down the hill. So your right thumb is not managing how fast you cross the slope, it is managing how high you sit on it. The input is tiny and constant, a breathing motion, a few thousand rpm of variation, never on and off. If you find yourself chopping the throttle you have already lost the line and are trying to save it with a big input, which will either bury you or throw the sled downhill fast. The fix is always earlier and smaller.
6. Sightline is your fourth input and it is free. Look where you want to be in five seconds, which on a sidehill means far across the slope and slightly up. Do not look at the snow in front of your skis, do not look at the tree you are worried about, and do not look downhill at the consequence. Riders drift toward whatever they stare at and this is more literal on a sled than on any other machine, because your head position drags your shoulders, and your shoulders are the counter-rotation that sets your edge. Staring at a downhill hazard actually rolls the machine toward it. Pick a target on the far side of the slope at the height you want to hold and keep your eyes there.
7. The transition from sidehill to climb is where this becomes useful rather than pretty. To turn a sidehill into a climb, you do not steer up the hill. You add throttle, drive the uphill knee harder into the tunnel and rotate the shoulders further up the slope, and the sled will simply start gaining height while holding the same edge. The nose comes around as a result of the roll angle, not as a result of bar input. To go the other way and shed height, ease the throttle a touch and let the shoulders square up, and the machine will settle down the slope in a controlled way. The reason to own both directions is that it lets you treat a whole face as adjustable terrain: you can pick a height, hold it past an obstacle, gain twenty metres to clear a rollover, then give it back on the far side, all in one continuous move without ever committing to a full climb or a full turn.
8. Practise both sides equally, and know that you will hate one of them. Everyone has a strong side, usually the one where their dominant leg ends up downhill. The weak side feels clumsy and you will avoid it, and then one day the only line out of a bowl will be on your weak side with cliffs below and you will find out exactly how much you avoided it. Deliberately spend the first half hour of every ride day on your weak side. The specific fault to watch for on your weak side is that riders subconsciously square up their hips instead of holding counter-rotation, so you get a sidehill that constantly wants to fall off. If your weak side feels like hard work in the forearms, that is the diagnostic: you are holding the sled with your arms because your torso is not doing its job.

Common Mistakes

Downhill foot forward, hugging the machine. Fix: force the uphill foot to the very front of the running board and the downhill foot to the very back before you even start moving, so the position is set rather than found.

• Using the bars to hold the roll angle, which loads the arms and kills the line inside a hundred metres. Fix: consciously relax the grip until you can feel the bars floating, and steer the roll angle with shoulder rotation and knee pressure only.
• Chopping the throttle when the sled starts falling off the hill. Fix: treat any correction over about a quarter throttle movement as evidence you reacted late, and rehearse making the same save with half the input.
• Looking at the downhill hazard. Fix: name your target out loud on the far side of the slope before you commit, and hold your eyes there through the whole traverse.
• Riding a sidehill too low on the slope so there is no room to recover. Fix: enter every new slope higher than you think you need, because you can always give height back and you can rarely take it.

The Drill

Find a clean open slope with a safe runout and no terrain traps. Pick two visual markers roughly a hundred metres apart across the face at the same height. Traverse from one to the other holding a single height, then turn around and come back on the other side. The standard: five clean laps each direction where your track is a single unbroken line at constant height, with no downhill drift and no correction that required more than a small throttle change. If your track wanders up and down like a heartbeat you are not there yet. When that is clean, repeat the drill adding a deliberate twenty metre gain in the middle of each traverse and a twenty metre give-back before the end marker.

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