(January 25, 2005) — Added to the roster of Olympic sports in 1998, snowboarding is rapidly outstripping skiing as the winter sport of choice for modern youth. Some look on it disdainfully as just a simplified form of skiing, but it is a decidedly different sport, allowing for greater freedom of techniques and tricks, with the tradeoff of reduced stability. Junior Edison Escobar, a veteran snowboarder of three years, believes that the reason so many beginning snowboarders remain beginners is the level of bruising and pain that typically occurs in the first few hours of learning to snowboard. “A lot of people quit snowboarding because it’s so much more painful than skiing, since you fall constantly for the first day or so,” said Escobar. “If you look at he bunny hill, you see tons of new snowboarders rolling around in the snow. They get up for like ten feet, then fall again. Meanwhile, the beginning skiers just coast down slowly. It’s pretty frustrating for a while.” Some decide on snowboarding precisely because it is so difficult, and is therefore a skill to be proud of. Junior Kayla Magee, who spends a few weekends each winter snowboarding at Mountain High, says, “The greatest moment of my snowboarding career was when I finally got better than the little kids on skis. I couldn’t stand them always not falling getting off the lift, then not falling down the hill. Then I figured out how not to fall, and I suddenly became so much cooler than those little kids.” Though Mountain High is convenient due to its proximity, it is clogged with beginning snowboarders and skiers and has a limited amount of terrain designed to accommodate aggressive snowboarding. Those with a greater desire for more challenging terrain and a greater percentage of snowboarders who don’t spend most of their time flopping around on the ground head to the more distant Bear Mountain, three hours away. It is almost completely geared toward skilled snowboarders, with the vast majority of its area being devoted to jumps, half pipes, and other terrain, terrifying to most novices. Besides clothing, which ranges from $5000 parkas and snow-pant sets to inexpensive jeans and a T-shirts, the equipment that makes snowboarding possible includes the board bindings and boots. The board is a surprisingly complex mesh of fiberglass plies edged with metal strips that enable it to grab onto even ice. Snowboards come in a wide variety of styles, with differing lengths, materials and types of bends. Bindings are pieces of plastic or metal which bolt onto the board and either latch onto boots or hold plastic straps to hold them in. Snowboard boots are typically unbending as well as extremely heavy, which makes walking in them quite cumbersome. Many have metal fixtures on the bottom to allow them to attach to bindings by simply stepping into them. Though snowboarding is certainly not a cheap pastime, many find it is well worth the money. According to the website for Mountain High, snowboarding is around $75 per day, which includes lift ticket and rentals. Snowboarders who choose to own their own board typically fork out between $400-$1000. Boards cost $150-$900, bindings are $100-$200 and boots are about the same.