THE SIDEHILL, PERFECTED

The Technique

1. Read every left and right in this lesson from the rider's point of view, standing on the machine facing forward. The left running board is the one under your left foot as you face the bars. We say left board and right board rather than uphill and downhill wherever we can, because uphill and downhill swap depending on which way you are crossing the slope and that is exactly where written instruction goes wrong.
2. 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, and the road there runs through foot position rather than arm strength.
3. Here is what wrong foot forward actually means, stated precisely, because the loose version taught in a lot of places is not the technique. To put the machine on its left edge, your right foot goes forward into the foot pocket at the front of the LEFT running board, and your left leg comes off the machine entirely on the left hand side. Your whole body ends up over the left board. The foot in the pocket is the foot from the *opposite* side of the sled, and that is the whole reason it is called the wrong foot. Mirror it for the other side: to put the machine on its right edge, the left foot goes forward into the right foot pocket and the right leg comes off to the right.
4. Note carefully what "wrong" refers to, because this is where most written explanations fall apart. The foot is wrong for the side of the machine it is planted on. It is not about uphill and downhill. You will find instruction that says wrong foot forward means the uphill foot goes forward, and that is a different and much weaker position that does not get your mass where it needs to be. The source here is Bret Rasmussen, who originated the term, and who puts it as plainly as it can be put: the right foot will be found on the left running board, or vice versa. Matt Entz teaches the same thing in Klim and SnoWest material, and so do Dan Adams and instructors in Golden. Four independent sources, one of them the man who named it, and they all describe the same position.
5. You do not arrive there in one movement, and the intermediate step has a name. From your normal riding stance you first cross to the board you want to load with your natural foot forward, so on the left board that means the left foot forward and the right foot behind it. Rasmussen calls this the Transfer position, and the important thing about it is that it is explicitly temporary. It is a step you pass through, not somewhere to live. From Transfer you bring the trailing right foot through and forward into the front pocket and let the left leg come off the machine, and that is wrong foot forward. Riders who stall out in Transfer and try to sidehill from there are the ones who end up fighting the bars.
6. Dan's entry, which is the practical version of that transition: you cut the edge of the left running board into the snow with your heel and pair it with a chop of the throttle, and the machine comes up so that you can simply stand on the board. The throttle chop is standard and well documented. The heel element is worth knowing is not published in that exact form anywhere we could find, so treat it as field-developed practice from Dan rather than as textbook, and see whether it suits you.
7. Now the honest part, because the sources genuinely disagree about the upper body and you deserve to know that rather than be handed one version as settled. The traditional teaching is counter-rotation: lower body and machine pointing along the fall line while the chest and shoulders turn up and across the slope, with the twist between them acting as your altitude control. Turn the shoulders further up the hill and the sled comes up on edge and climbs; let them square up and it settles down the slope. Dan Adams explicitly teaches the opposite, keeping shoulders and hips square to the direction of travel in what he calls the box, and he names the counter-rotated hip-to-the-hill posture as the outdated method. We could not verify where Rasmussen sits on this. Our recommendation is to learn the shoulder input as your fine altitude control because it is smooth and analogue in a way that bar input never is, but to know that a good instructor may teach you the square version and to ride whichever one your body actually holds a clean line with.
8. Now the running boards. Your weight does not sit evenly on them and it does not sit in the middle of them. The loaded board carries you, and specifically the ball of your foot near the rear of that board, because that is where you can push down and drive the track edge into the slope. 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 rather than the toe, and keep the loaded leg long. Some instructors teach driving the free-side knee into the seat or tunnel as a lever to hold the roll angle, and we should flag that this cue is not universal - some avalanche and riding programmes describe kneeling with the downhill leg instead. Try both and keep the one that holds your line.
9. 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, never on and off. If you find yourself chopping the throttle mid-traverse 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.
10. 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 what set your edge. Staring at a downhill hazard actually rolls the machine toward it.
11. The three ways into a sidehill are not equally hard, and this is the distinction most instruction skips entirely. The foot position is the same in all three. What changes is your fore and aft weighting and the input that gets you there.
12. Entering from flat ground or from a traverse is the teaching case. You have time, the machine is stable, and you can set the Transfer position and then the wrong foot forward position deliberately. Learn it here first and do not move on until it is automatic on both sides.
13. Entering from a climb means turning across the slope before your momentum dies. Your weight goes rearward to lighten the front so the skis come up and across rather than ploughing, which is Chris Burandt's teaching. The timing constraint is that you must commit while you still have drive, because a machine that has run out of climb will not turn out, it will slide backwards, and that is a genuinely bad place to be.
14. Entering from a descent is the hard one, and it is worth knowing that before you try it. Your weight is forward, gravity is already committed to the fall line, and the recognised input is a brake tap to set the machine, then a burst of throttle to bring it up onto the edge, timed to the crest or the rollover. Everything happens faster than in the other two cases and there is less margin to fix a mistake. Do not learn the sidehill on a descent entry.
15. Practise both sides equally, and know that you will hate one of them. Everyone has a strong side. 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. Spend the first half hour of every ride day on your weak side. The diagnostic is simple: if your weak side burns your forearms, you are holding the sled with your arms because your body position is not doing its job.

Common Mistakes

Believing wrong foot forward means the uphill foot goes forward. Fix: it means the opposite-side foot goes in the forward pocket. On the left board, that is the right foot, with the left leg off the machine.

• Trying to sidehill from the Transfer position. Fix: Transfer is a step you pass through, not a stance. Bring the trailing foot through to the front pocket and let the other leg come off.
• Using the bars to hold the roll angle, which loads the arms and kills the line inside a hundred metres. Fix: relax the grip until the bars float, and control the roll with body position and throttle only.
• Chopping the throttle when the sled starts falling off the hill. Fix: any correction bigger than a small throttle movement is evidence you reacted late. Rehearse the same save with half the input.
• Looking at the downhill hazard. Fix: name a target out loud on the far side of the slope before you commit, and hold your eyes there.
• Learning the sidehill on a descent entry. Fix: descent entry is the hardest of the three. Learn on flat or traverse entry until the position is automatic.
• Riding a sidehill too low on the slope so there is no room to recover. Fix: enter higher than you think you need. 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 markers roughly a hundred metres apart across the face at the same height. Traverse between them holding a single height, then turn around and come back on the other side, entering from the flat each time. The standard is five clean laps each direction where your track is one unbroken line at constant height with no downhill drift. Deliberately name each stage out loud as you do it - transfer, then wrong foot forward - until the sequence is automatic. When that is clean, add a twenty metre gain in the middle of each traverse and a twenty metre give-back before the end marker. Only then start practising climb entries, and only after those are clean should you go near descent entries.

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