River Boarding in the Snow

If you don’t know what river boarding is, here is what Wikipedia says: River boarding is a board sport in which the participant lies prone on their board with fins on their feet for propulsion and steering. This sport is also known as hydrospeed in Europe and as river boarding or white-water sledging in New Zealand, depending on the type of board used.

Typically, a river boarder faces into a rapid and tries to hydroplane in the rapid and do tricks. For a video showing Donna and me river boarding at a whitewater park in Texas, follow this link:

Anyway, we moved to North Carolina very recently in order to take advantage of a lot of whitewater opportunities for kayaking, rafting and river boarding. We have only been here for two weeks and two things have kept us from doing any of these sports – the fact that our equipment is still boxed up somewhere and the weather. It has been pretty miserable so far.

But, it snowed last night, not a lot, but enough to allow us to do something else with our river board. The following is a link to a YouTube video of us going down a slope in our backyard. It may not look like it, but we go going pretty fast (lying on your stomach watching the ground zip by made it seem a lot faster, I’m sure).

We have decided that this should be a new Olympic sport – senior citizen snow river boarding (not snowboarding – there are a lot of snowboarding sports in the Olympics already).