Snowboarding South Dakota

Sometimes Mother Nature feels sorry for us flat landers and decides to brighten our day in oh so many ways: shovelling snow drifts, digging out stuck 4x4s and more as winter's icy grip tightens on the Northern Great Plains. My most recent day-brightening experience involved snowboarding on the Lake Oahe bluffs.

This winter's combination of snow, already the season's average at 28" and wind direction dumped a pile of snow on the face of the dam. A brief thaw a few weeks ago followed by another 6-10" of the fluffy white hexagonal crystals created a perfect sliding surface for snowboards and probably other recreational snow tools like telemark skis, sleds and toboggans. Since my telemarking days are long gone the venerable snowboard allows me to achieve the gravitationally-induced euphoria so foreign to us prisoners of the prairie.

I'd scouted the snow a couple days earlier while returning from town after a morning's swim and was convinced that the snow was boardable (i.e., deep enough to cover all the usual hazards including the erosion riprap at the road's edge). So, while enroute to town to attend the social gathering of the SD Bicycle Coalition Annual Summit Meeting I stopped the van donned bibs, boots and clicked into my board and sat on the guardrail waiting for my wife to drive the van around to take up position to video the run. With Michele in place I dropped in.

Though a far cry from heliboarding the Bugaboos, the bluffs along Lake Oahe make great downhill runs.