Looking for Winter Thrills? Try Snowkiting!

Growing up, Colorado Springs resident Tom Hoskins had two passions: sailing and snowboarding.

And he never imagined the two would meet. Then he tried snowkiting.

“It’s amazing — the most powerful, intense sensation you can imagine. It’s like flying.” he said as he assembled a 9-meter, C-shaped kite on the snowy surface of frozen Dillon Reservoir.

“I used to sail all summer and hit the slopes in the winter, now I can do both.”

He was one of about 70 kiters who converged from as far away as Taiwan and Russia for the 7th annual Dillon Snowkite Open — a weekend of races and freestyle competitions showcasing what has been, up to now, a very obscure sport.

Zipping along at 25 mph

They shot across the snow, leaving rooster tails of powers at 25 miles per hour, hooking their kites into the wind to suddenly go airborne, drifting for up to 100 feet.

Snow kiting is a mix between wakeboarding and snowboarding — only instead of using a speedboat or a chairlift for the needed power, kiters hook themselves to crescent-shaped kites that resemble paragliders.

The sport evolved from a handful of sources. Of course, people have been using kites to pull boats for over 1,000 years. Sails, after all, are little more than kites with no string. But skiers using parachutes and sailors using modified kites both started toying with modern kite power for sport in the 1980s. They learned they could shoot across the water, ski uphill, and even leave the ground using wind power.

The first primitive commercial kites for riding on water became available in the mid-1990s and kiting burst onto the scene as an upstart alternative to windsurfing. Since then, the kiting population has taken off as better gear makes kiting safer, easier and more fun. Kiters can now even gracefully tack upwind like racing sloops.

“It’s growing fast,” said Heather Schenck, the distributor for Ozone kites, one of the largest manufacturers. “New people are getting into it all the time.”

It did not take long for people who had been sailing on snow and ice to adopt the technology being developed for water. By 2000, a small number of kiteboarders who had learned on the beach were showing up in snowbound places like Summit County.

“There was almost no-one doing it back then, maybe three people in all of Colorado,” said Anton Rainold, who learned to kiteboard in Hawaii in 2000 and ended up moving to Summit County in 2003. He decided to drag his board and kite out to the open powder of Dillon Reservoir. An afternoon of surfing untouched powder had him hooked.

“I have not gone snowboarding at a resort in years. Kiteboarding is just way more fun, and you never have to stand in line.”

In 2004 Rainhold started Colorado Kite Force, a local snowkite school.

Six winters later, he had taught hundreds of people to kite.

“It’s everyone from tourists who want to try something different to world-class water kiters who want to try the snow for the first time,” Rainold said.

Similar schools have popped up all around the country from Montana and Wyoming to the frozen lakes of Minnesota — basically wherever wind and snow are plentiful. Colorado has two.

Wind gives you a lift – uphill

As rider numbers have grown, it has spurred better gear, such as snowkite-specific kites jackets and boards. All this makes the sport more attractive to newcomers.

But riders say the real draw is the new school of riding. Increasingly, snowkiters are leaving behind level lakes and sailing through open terrain above treeline where kiters can ski uphill to distant powder, then bomb down, using their kites like small parachutes to catch air off the rolling slopes and glide for hundreds of feet.

“That’s where a lot of our interest is coming from,” said Schenk, who with her husband, runs a school at the mecca of the sport, Skyline, Utah. “We get backcountry skiers who see that we don’t have to trudge uphill and say, ‘Hey, that looks fun.’”

This new group of kiteboarders with backcountry experience are pushing into the intense terrain of high mountain passes like Loveland Pass, Vail Pass, Lizard Head Pass and Red Mountain Pass.

“That’s the real stuff, the intense stuff,” said Hoskins.

On one trip he took his kite up to a pristine alpine bowl called Mayflower Gulch where rolling, perfect terrain was hemmed in on all sides by steep, rock spires.

“I spent hours up there, just playing around. No lifts. No crowds. Nothing,” he said, smiling as he remembered the day. “At one point I was coming down a slope and just lifted up with my kite and I was flying. I was off the ground for, like, two minutes. It was totally amazing.”

TRY SNOWKITING

Colorado Kite Force

Dillon Best deal for beginners: four-hour lesson, $349