I may be heading into “Pull up your pants and get off my lawn” territory here, but I’m getting severely burned out on the foul language that seems to be synonymous with snowboarders in the Sierras…what gives?  When I became a snow skier (fairly late in life, at age 32), snowboarding was just starting to catch on, and it looked like an exciting new way to plow down the slopes. In fact, the year after I became a skier, snowboarding became a Winter Olympics sport.  New snowboarding athletes began to emerge, with a kind of rebel attitude (and expensive fashion sense) that caught on with the 20-something crowd. My two sons jumped on the bandwagon in the winter of 2008, and they’re still pretty good snowboarders to this day.  What I noticed about snowboarding was it began to take over from traditional skiing in popularity, and so you saw fewer skiers and more boarders on the slopes, especially at less expensive ski areas (you know, like the kind I go to). Are these foul-mouthed millennials just expressing their unhappiness about having to share the snow-covered hills with old guys like me? Do snowboarders still think they’re “outlaws” who need to curse up a blue streak every time they get in line for the lift? I’m not sure why the over-use of profanity seems to exist in this cool sub-set of snow activity, but I wish y’all would “shut-the-front-door” and just ride.  Save the heavy-duty swear words for when you miscalculate that inverted back-flip.

(Photo by Joshua Reddekop)

John Young