Uncle Dave Goes Snow Biking?

Skiing (or snowboarding) is both the best and the worst of sport. At best, it is tough to beat the feeling of a good turn through nice snow on a beautiful mountain. The flip side is the pit of despair one reaches after forking out hundreds of dollars to line up for hours (over-and-over again) in order to plow through six inches of slushy concrete. Those who say things like “the worst day on snow is better than the best day at work!” probably haven’t been trapped in a holiday weekend post-Whistler Lion’s Gate Bridge traffic jam.

For me, biking holds more of a consistent middle ground. There’s less variability and more opportunities, which tends to even out my experience. Even if I’ve just had the worst ride of my life, I likely didn’t spend a few hundred dollars and line up for a couple of hours to obtain the experience. Although, thinking about certain days in the Whistler bike park, maybe that’s not entirely correct? And, thinking about this even more, maybe what I actually have is a Whistler lift line problem?

So, there you have it. Skiing and mountain biking. Two sports with a lot of overlap, yet seasonally offset. Of course people will attempt to combine these two sports (although one could argue that lift serviced bike parks already do) into one mutant golem. What cyclist hasn’t thought of how amazing it would be to carve epic winter lines… on a bicycle? Who wouldn’t want to experience a sublime, floating pow turns…on a bicyle? I mean, heaven forbid a cyclist do something else for a few months of the year, or learn a new, established form of utilizing snow for recreation. Let’s figure out a way to tack over-priced lift tickets, cold weather and 8-dollar hot chocolates onto our cycling experience, why don’t we?

So, it turns out, in addition to being a bit of a self-hating skier, I’m also a bit of a snob on top of that. I’m not stating this as if it’s any sort of surprise to me, but it feels like something I should state plainly for all of you. That doesn’t mean I’m a total asshole on the ski hill. I’ll happily point you in the right direction if you’re lost, or smile nicely as you clatter around on the tails of my skis in the lift line. But as you shatter norms and unknowingly offend I’m going to quietly judge the shit out of you.

I’m also a purist. I still shudder a bit whenever I see a kid ripping around in the park without ski poles, never mind this guy (I actually typed “Swedish slopestyle skier no poles droopy pants” in as my search terms to find Henrik Harlaut. And it worked!). I never cared all that much when snowboarders showed up at the mountain, but the appearance of snowlerblades gave me fits. Part of me feels like we already have enough ways to seek enjoyment on the snow, and question why we put so much energy into making snow sports easier. Are more people with fewer skills really what we need at our ski resorts?

So, in having to deal with all of those thoughts in my life, in popped Pete, asking me if I was interested in heading to Salt Lake City to spend a few days in the mountains. Heavens yes, Pete! I got so excited I nearly missed the part where he mentioned I would be riding around on a ski bike. Did he secretly know how torn up I would be over this decision? Does he relish in turning the screws on me, by presenting me with these glorious opportunities with that one little catch? Is it possible that I might be the worst possible person for this experience? Do I need to stop asking myself rhetorical questions in all of my articles? Or maybe I was just the only person willing to commit to a last minute trip, the week before Christmas? It’s hard to know with Pete.

On Ski Bikes

Before embarking on this project, I didn’t know a lot about ski bikes. I have distant memories of numerous attempts in the past, and I was quite surprised to find out that these are actually a thing, and there is a pretty deep community of ski bikers. Christ, there’s even an American Ski Biking Association! Just imagine their AGM!

From their website, you can learn more about the various types of ski bikes. You’ve got your Type I, which you sit on and use foot skis (here). You’ve got your Type II, which is a bit more like a classic bicycle, with dual skis and footpegs (here, here, here and here). And you’ve got your Type III, which is more fancy tricycle than bicycle (here).

Today, we’re going to focus on the Type III SNO-GO ski bicycle? Why? Well, because they footed the bill for me to fly to Salt Lake City and try one out.

The SNO-GO

Before we talk about the SNO-GO, I'm going to drop this Nicholi Rogatkin helmet cam video from the trees of Brighton. This is about as close to snow mountain biking as you can hope to get, and is going to maximize your understanding of the SNO-GO.

Now, to answer your first question, yes, they really do capitalize all of the letters. Digging deeper, if you really break the SNO-GO down to the essence, it could be described as a pair of short skis strapped to your feet and held together by a fancy linkage, with a half of a bicycle sticking out the front. There are a few different models, but they’re all essentially the same base product with different combinations of skis and components. The cheapest model starts at 2000 USD, which gets you skinnier all mountain skis and an unlabelled fork. It tops out at 3400 USD for the powder ski/Fox 36 equipped model. (You can also pick up a trio of powder skis for 681 USD) There is a Canadian store, as well, but right now it looks limited to the middle-of-the-road model for 3700 CAD.

For such a relatively young product (SNO-GO started selling their ski bikes in 2017), the SNO-GO is very refined. Everything feels very deliberate and thought out. The linkage looks complex on the surface, but makes a lot of sense once you are on snow. The frame looks extremely robust and seems like it can take a beating. And while the thought of handling what is essentially a large bicycle with skis feels daunting, the SNO-GO easily breaks down into 3 main pieces so it’s pretty easy to transport.

Set-up is far simpler than your average bicycle. SNO-GOs are essentially one-size-fits-all, save for adjustments to your stack height and binding fit. Even if you’re unfamiliar with how it all works, it’s a very quick process to get the bike assembled and set up for a particular rider.

Salt Lake City

Now that broad strokes of ski biking are established, let’s get the destination out of the way, because I’d not-so-secretly prefer to be a travel writer. If you’ve never been to Salt Lake City, my goodness is it a strange place. It has changed a lot since I was last there a dozen years ago. It’s much easier to buy alcohol, for one, and there are plenty of new and interesting buildings popping up. But it’s still a terrible place for an urban stroll which makes it somewhat difficult to operate as a tourist. Transit is easy enough, so you’ll likely want to make use of the streetcar network rather than braving the mean streets on foot.

Here are some random observations:

• It’s really tough to beat the access Salt Lake City gives you to the mountains. Where else do you have several world class ski areas within an hour of a major city?
• Our home base was the Evo Hotel. Which is amazing! It has beautiful common areas, and is attached to two bike/ski shops, a large indoor bouldering gym and even has its own skatepark. You can take photos in the downstairs photo booth or throw a game of cornhole upstairs. It seems tailor made for those looking for an adventure holiday. I also had to sign a form stating that I wouldn’t drink alcohol in any of their public areas.
• Salt Lake City shuts down early! Now, it might not be easy to find food in Vancouver past 11:00 on a Tuesday night, but at least up here you can rely on McDonald’s to be open. If you see food and you’re hungry, eat it, because it might not be open when you come back. The image below is me, slowly losing my mind at midnight, waiting for my Uber Eats driver to drive across town with my Mexican food as there were no food options within walking distance.

• It’s almost comical how serious Utah is about ID and alcohol. You cannot buy a drink in this place without your ID, and that out-of-country drivers license isn’t going to cut it. Nearly half of the places we went insisted on a passport, and then inspected it like it was Checkpoint Charlie in the 1970’s. Without any exaggeration, I spent less time getting through the border into the US than I did trying to get in to TF Brewing. Shoutout to TF Brewing! Toughest doorlady in the business.
• One more note about booze, because this place is absolutely obsessed with alcohol. There are so many rules, and so much emphasis placed on doing things very specifically, it starts to all become a little strange and you can’t not think about booze! It reminds me of Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and his anti-porn app. Most people don’t need an app on their phone that alerts their child when they are surfing porn, you know?

My feelings for Salt Lake City swung back-and-forth between “Wow! What a cool place!” and “It’s only 6 hours until my flight. May as well head to the airport.”

On The Mountain

So we made it to Salt Lake City. We wandered around for a bit, and eventually, arrived at the top of Brighton, astride a SNO-GO. We’re feeling a little bit silly. Now what? Many suggestions were provided. Most were forgotten. “Don’t steer it like a car” stuck out and made sense.

Our first run was a blue run that meandered down from one chairlift to another. This felt ambitious. Initial turns were tentative. It felt familiar but it was distinctly weird. Learning how to stop felt important. I settled into a comfortable little place of extreme countersteer and a lot of skidding. Imagine the Yeti snow man, but with both of your feet firmly in place.

I often say that learning to ski is about two separate things. The first is conquering your fear of sliding down a mountain on snow. The second is learning to ski. I feel like this holds for most winter sports. Fairly quickly, I felt reasonably certain that I wasn’t going to careen into a tree and die, so I was able to start focusing on my technique. For the first few runs, turns involved a lot of thinking and planning. There was a very conscious lean in, push on your inside hand and work it out from there. I had imagined that I would be using my legs a lot more through the turns, but it seemed like it was more about the top half of your body than you would expect.

After a few runs, it felt possible to lean a bit more and skid a lot less. The whole countersteer and skid technique is a good point of safety, and a place you’ll likely come back to when trying to stop. However, if you want to carry any sort of speed, you need to ride the thing like it’s a motorcycle, with lots of lean and lots of weight on your inside hand. You need to push your weight forward and focus on your hands. For me, it was tough to get the stack to a height that suited my height, but this almost made it easier to get my weight forward. We were late to the mountain, so after 4 runs we called it a day.

As we drove back to the hotel, I reflected on what I had just experienced. There’s a very steep learning curve to the SNO-GO. Despite only a few runs, I felt pretty comfortable and was moving at the speed of an intermediate skier. I had a pretty good sense of control, and I was even starting to duck in and out of the trees a little bit. Indeed, it was on those little eight-year-old-boy-hitting-jumps-on-the-side-of-the-run lines where the SNO-GO really shone, and felt the most like you were riding a mountain bike. I started to see a place for this thing. If the snow wasn’t that great (it wasn’t) and the runs weren’t all that steep (they weren’t), why not do something new and novel?

Day Two

Day one had been a slow start, and day two continued with a similar pace. Generally speaking, you approach these media events with the barest of information, so slow development isn’t all that unusual as everything is very last minute and you figure most things out on the fly. Colour me surprised to learn that this wasn’t even a media launch! No, dear reader, I was in Utah for the inaugural SNO-GO Fest, where Reed Boggs and Nicholi Rogatkin invited a bunch of their friends out for a week of SNO-GOing and shirtless parking lot hangs. And me. I was there too. Like an impatient dad, fretting around in the background, making sure that the fun didn’t get too out of hand. It took me a full day (and realizing that the guy showing me the video of his backflip in the terrain park was Nicholi Rogatkin) to figure this all out.

So, as I was saying, day two started rather slowly. We drove up to Woodward Park City, and the professionals rode their bikes in the foam pit while the rest of us watched. I had some momentary thoughts of borrowing a bike and trying to learn how to do a 360, but two things held me back. The first was that in preparation for snowy conditions on a mountain, I had only brought casual pants and hiking boots. The second was that I would have had to share the space with a crew of dudes throwing down 360’s and flip variations as their warmup. Standing on the sidelines felt like a safer bet.

I wound up feeling a bit like a forgotten child, hoping that his dad will put down the cards for a few minutes and humour him with a game of ping pong. The skier in me was absolutely fretting. Here we were, amongst some of the top ski resorts on the continent, and we’re inside riding bicycles? Sure, it was pretty cool to see Rogatkin and co. sending it to the moon, throwing increasingly complicated trick variations, but you can only do that for so long. At one point somebody rolled out a wheeled SNO-GO and my confusion peaked. It was like going to Italy, stumbling into the local pizzeria and discovering that they’ve taken their inspiration from a Pizza Hut on the side of the highway in Abbotsford. There’s a freaking bicycle RIGHT OVER THERE! I walked around the parking a lot a few times to tamp down my negativity.

Eventually, once the sun had gone down, we grabbed the SNO-GOs and headed for the hill. I was pretty excited to finally be doing something, and I was surprised when it felt like my skills had regressed.

Much of that was down to the location. Woodward Salt Lake is an interesting little place. It was very early in the season, so there was only one run open. That run had some open space to carve turns, as well as some medium sized park hits. It was filled with eight-year-old kids casually lofting 3’s and hitting rails. And then there I was, falling off the top of the chairlift, nearly getting clanged in the head.

If you’re a skier, riding a SNO-GO involves forgetting things that you already know. The weirdest thing is re-learning how to do things that you’ve done a thousand times. Getting off the lift isn’t hard, but it’s also a bit strange. You have to sort of wait, push and then jump on the SNO-GO. This is pretty simple on a detachable lift, but gets a bit weird on a fixed grip. Turns out, you can overthink it! And if you wait too long, you’ll fall off and then the chair will very nearly clang you in the head. It would be fair to say though, that this was more of a Dave problem than a SNO-GO problem. The liftee actually slowed the lift down for me every time I came around after that, which is pretty much as low as you can sink on a ski hill.

So, again, there I was, pride relatively intact (but slowly tiptoeing away), standing at the top of a run that felt a bit too steep and icy for my skill level. The nice thing is that the SNO-GO actually does a really good job of gripping on hard snow. I think this is down to the weight distribution and the articulation of the rear end putting a lot of pressure into the edges, just by design. Unlike with skiing and snowboarding, you don’t need any sort of advanced technique to maintain your edge on difficult snow.

Still, it wasn’t a lot of fun. It just felt a bit like we were mowing the lawn, making our way up and down the hill because we were there. Don’t get me wrong, I think things would have been similar if I was a beginner skier or snowboarder under the same conditions, and I probably would have broken my legs on the jump if I had my skis with me. Still, this kind of changed my thought on the SNO-GO being a fun activity for when the snow is bad.

Day Three

For day three, we were back up to the familiar slopes of Brighton, and we were out the door early, on time, and relatively organized. We were a total scene in the parking lot, and eventually our huge group barged on over to the lift and made our way to the top. One more time, there I was, standing at the top of a hill that felt too steep and too icy for my skill level.

The thing about skis is that I can throw them sideways on pretty much a zero axis. I don’t need much room or planning to dump speed. While at this point I was gaining confidence on the SNO-GO, I discovered that when you’re sharing a narrow, icy cat track with a whole pile of SNO-GOs, stopping isn’t quite as easy as it is on skis. It was taking me a split second and a few meters to plan out. It didn’t help that the majority of the other SNO-GOers that I was trying to keep up with were professional cyclists, both further up the learning curve and further up the genetic pole than I. We were only on what I would describe as a deep blue groomer, but I was far from having the confidence necessary to keep up. Again, rather than building my confidence, I felt it shrinking away. Halfway down the second run somebody actually said “Oh. Dave. You’re here! I didn’t know you had come along with us.” Well fuck me. I said my goodbyes and headed for some easier, solo laps.

I found my way back to the mellower blues we had ridden on day one. With a bit less incline and a whole lot less pressure, I started to feel my confidence return. With each run I could lean a bit more and countersteer a bit less. By around mid-day I felt like I could lay it into turns pretty well, and I started to mess around with some smaller jumps and some kiddie boxes in the terrain park. Was I an expert? Fuck no. Was I having some fun and holding my own? Yes. Yes I was. I finished the day feeling like I had a pretty good grasp on the SNO-GO.

Who is the SNO-GO for?

This is the big question that I looked to ask during my few days on the SNO-GO. Is this thing for me? Who is it for? Before we get to that, here are some random observations on my time as a SNO-GOer.

• As people that likely spend a fair amount of money on bikes, you’ll be a bit disappointed in some of the parts on the entry model SNO-GO that I was using. It had a no-name fork that felt more like a loose headset than a suspension fork, and an adjustable stem that did hold the handlebars in place, but just kind of looked like it would collapse and take my teeth with it. I spent more than a few minutes thinking about all of the higher quality stems, handlebars and forks sitting in my garage at home. You’re likely in a similar position and will enjoy the experience of kitting your SNO-GO out with higher quality components. I feel like this would be a really great application for a Z1 Coil. Or just splurge for the one with the Fox fork and Deity components.
• The SNO-GO is remarkably easy on the body. The multiple days of soreness after my first day of skiing for the season always drives home just how old, weak and inflexible I am. I didn’t feel any of that, even after a few days on the SNO-GO.
• Resorts are built around skiers and snowboarders. Mostly, this isn’t a problem, but small little things crop up that make you realize that this wasn’t a world built for a SNO-GO. Where does your SNO-GO go when you grab a bite of lunch in the lodge (down a snowbank, wedged against the building is the answer)? What about all of these new, automated lifts with gates and conveyor belts that are just a bit too skinny for the handlebars on a SNO-GO? Holding up a long lift line, letting a few chairs go by and then hopping on a 6-pack chair by yourself isn’t a great feeling.
• SNO-GOs aren’t light, in the ballpark of 33-35 pounds, depending on how it is outfitted. I seldom concern myself with the weight of my bicycle, but consider that this thing doesn’t roll across the parking lot.
• While on the SNO-GO, I experienced mixed reactions from others. There were lots of surprised looks and questions. Many were super excited and asked if or where they could try one. I also became aware of just how awful many skiers and snowboarders are towards other humans. One easy run that we rode a few times happened to be the most direct route from one lift to another. Never mind that this was a mellow blue peppered with slow signs, there were a tonne of skiers (fewer snowboarders) screaming down this run, and many decided to cut it really close to me as I meandered my way down to the lift. Lots of skiers/snowboarders also seemed really excited to tell me exactly what I was doing wrong. One snowboarder balled me out for stopping at the top of a cat track. Beside a slow sign. Amongst a sea of similarly stopped skiers and snowboarders. So, prepare for the good and bad of being different
• For locals, Cypress Mountain now has a rental fleet of SNO-GOs. No pricing yet, but I can’t imagine it will be less than the ~$50 per day to rent a pair of skis. SNO-GO has a full list of resorts open to SNO-GOs here. The list is probably a lot larger than you would expect.

In speaking with the people at SNO-GO, their goal isn’t really to convert skiers or snowboarders, but to introduce new people to snow sports. They’re not against giving people who no longer ski or snowboard a new experience, but it won’t be their bread and butter. You, dear reader, are probably just the person they are hoping will become interested in what they are doing.

I’m really curious myself to see how successful they are. For me, going to the mountain is something that I grew up with, and as I ski less-and-less with each passing year, it all starts to seem a little bit crazy. Skiing and snowboarding takes so much time and so much money, and involves so much bullshit that skiers/snowboarders have been trained from a young age to accept. If you’re an avid mountain biker that isn’t used to that experience, do you start now on a SNO-GO? Are you willing to spend a few hundred dollars to try it out? Are you willing to spend thousands more to keep it up?

The most intriguing use case for me is for skiers and snowboarders who now physically struggle with their sports. SNO-GO tells me that they’ve heard from quite a number of people that used to ski, but that struggled after something like a knee injury. The SNO-GO gives them back that freedom that they were used to, as it’s just less physically demanding.

For myself, I’m glad to have had the experience. Anytime I can get out into the mountains, I’m a pretty happy guy. I learned something new and didn’t injure myself in the process. Would I go back for SNO-GO Fest 2024? Absolutely! I’d bring bicycle riding gear next time and plan on learning a 360 at Woodward foam pit. What’s a harder question is whether I would SNO-GO on my own time. There was mention that there might be one offered up on loan for the NSMB crew. I could see myself hauling one up to Cypress (should the snow ever return), skiing for a few runs and then trying out the SNO-GO once I got bored. That’s a privilege that I have that most of you likely don’t. So, honest question for you NSMBers that don’t ski or snowboard, that don’t have a seasons pass at a local resort and that don’t have free access to a SNO-GO – how likely are you to try one?

SNO-GO