Lesley McKenna: Why I love snowboarding
In honour of World Snowboarding Day on December 20, pro snowboarder Lesley McKenna explains what snowboarding means to her.
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What does snowboarding mean to me? Well, snowboarding captures the little moments in my life that are timeless. The moments that I can replay again and again, wherever I am. With snowboarding, I feel total contentment and ultimate fulfillment, something that is so hard to come by in our fast-paced, commodity-dominated and image-conscious society. These moments stand outside time and refuse to be objectified or packaged yet never lose their intensity or value in my life, unlike any of the material ‘valuables’ I have ever owned.
With friends, in powder, in the beautiful but dangerous mountains and saturated with the feeling of adventure, these snowboard moments have a unique motif in the stored mythology that makes up my life’s experiences. This motif permeates not only my memories, but my very being, bringing both intense happiness and deep longing for more of the same.
But these memories are equally as strong whether they come from the North American Rockies, the European Alps or my home in the Scottish mountains.
In fact, a day in Scotland a few years back sticks in my mind a little more than others. It was already May and the nights were stretching out towards warmer seasons. There had been a bumper snowfall in Scotland in February and March that year but I had not yet had the chance to sample it. I had been lucky that year to travel to many great snowboarding destinations to both film and compete, but what I really wanted was to get some shred time in back at home. When I finally made it back at the end of April, I was ecstatic to see that the snow was still abundant and my riding buddies still keen for a slide.
We woke up early one sunny Saturday morning and after hitching a lift from the local gamekeeper, we were hiking up a snowy ridge at 8am, miles away from the nearest main road or anyone else at all. By 10.30am, we were standing on top of a beautiful snow covered peak to the west of the Cairngorm ski area with acres of homegrown Scottish powder dusted slopes below us.
Despite being breathless from the hike, we were all smiling from ear-to-ear at the scenery and the sheer awesomeness (in the very un-American sense of the word) around us.
The ride down was really just icing on the cake!
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Why I love snowboarding (text) by Lesley McKenna is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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