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Show A15 Castle Valley Review, February 2009 “ On flat ground a kiter can easily jump five to 20 feet. It excites us because we don’t need a kicker or a jump; you can just anytime you want send the kite up high above you and it pendulums you into the sky. - Brian Schenck Brian Schenck unpacks a snowkite. Continued from previous page again and again over the years. “It’s just good fun. I’ve never handed a kite to someone and have them hand it back and say ‘this just isn’t for me.’ You’re tying into nature when you have a good wind pulling you along at 30 miles an hour,” Brian said. Snowkiting is the answer for snow skiers or boarders who have lamented the waste of perfectly good powder on a flat field. “With wind you can go as fast across the flat as you can with gravity down a steep slope. As soon as we started finding the terrain in the hills, which has just been in the past five years really, since we learned hot to ride up hill and across hills, we started having fast runs down and then eventually you started flying off of the slope. On flat ground a kiter can easily jump five to 20 feet,” Brian said with a grin. “It excites us because we don’t need a kicker or a jump; you can just anytime you want send the kite up high above you and it pendulums you into the sky. On the flats five to 20 feet is pretty comparable to what they do at the ski resorts, but when you start coming down the hills, like up here at Skyline, and you have the updraft winds you can get way more air than “ Skyline is a ski resort without the chair lifts and a snowkite is a ski lift in a backpack. ” you ever expect. We don’t like to brag about it but guys have been 100 feet above the trees here. It’s definitely the extreme side of kiting. We want to remind people that the sport is whatever you want. You can choose a smaller kite and stay on the flats. We’ve had grandparents riding with their grandkids.” While the extreme side of the sport can make for incredible images of kiters soaring through the air, it doesn’t have to be an extreme sport and Brain said anyone who can ski or snowboard can snowkite. “Whether you’re a skier or a snowboarder, kiting is like grabbing a T-bar and having it pull you up the hill. You’re holding onto a handlebar like a mountain bike handlebar. Pull it left, you go left; pull right, you go right. And if you have snowboard or skiing experience it makes it that much easier because you’re already comfortable on the snow. I tell people to bring whatever you’re comfortable with and what you have in your garage. If you’re a skier and you have an old set of skis in the garage, bring those,” Brian said. While Skyline Drive is in Sanpete County and most directions to reach Skyline say to drive up Fairview Canyon, from Castle Valley the drive is up Huntington Canyon. The majority of snowkiters stay in Fairview or Mt. Pleasant, but Brian said as the area becomes more popular he has seen more visitors from the Colorado area who drive to Price and then drive over Huntington Canyon to kite at Skyline. To introduce the sport even more to locals, Brain said he hopes to start snowkite clubs at the College of Eastern Utah and Snow College. There is no doubt that the sport is growing in fame, and with it Skyline Drive. “We wondered if we were just bragging up Skyline because this is where we love to ride. But we had the International Snowkite Association come here to judge the location. They organize and run several competitive events in Europe. We wanted to know if it was good for a local or state competition and did it meet the standards for a national competition. They walked away saying they would love to hold a world championship here someday,” Brain said. Skyline will be the site for the U.S. Open Snowkite Masters from Feb. 26 to March 1 and Brian said he was expecting more than 100 kiters to gather at Skyline for the competition, one of them will be his wife Heather, who is an experienced snowkiter. “We’ll have riders from across Europe, across the U.S., from everywhere coming up here,” he said. ” As snowkiting has moved into a competitive sport, Brian said organizers have tried to determine the best way to judge competitions. “We tried several different mediums. Originally the event started as a free ride event, which was just basically a gathering of kiters. We put the word out and invited people and just had some fun things to do. As we added the U.S. Open and National Championships we’ve done both freestyle and racing and we’ve found that freestyle is very difficult to judge because with the kite allowing you to fly so high and float so long, everybody is having a good time and freestyle is just up to your own unique personality, so we’ve chosen racing as our basis for judging kiting. We basically have turn point flags up on the hills at different areas. It might be a two mile course and the kiters will have to use up-wind skills, kiting into the wind as well as kiting up hill and then some fast runs, which allows them to really start booking. We’ll run in heats,” Brian said. As Brian and Heather pull their gear out of the truck and the wayward kayakers prepare for their next adventure, Brian grins out at the snow-covered slopes of Skyline. “Skyline is a ski resort without the chair lifts and a snowkite is a ski lift in a backpack,” he said. |