Back in high school, when I was going through life guard training (“lesson 1: how to spin your whistle without hitting yourself in the face”), one of the first things we learned was the simple survival skill called the dead man’s float. It had nothing to do with swimming or saving people and everything to do with keeping yourself alive. Well, skiing has a similar skill. It’s called the kick turn and its applications are nearly endless. I used it on a traverse of the Italian Dolomites in the worst breakable crust in the history of breakable crust and I used it at 18,000 feet on a Mexican volcano to take a break from my wheezing, hypoxic slalom turns. In big, rugged ski areas like Snowbird or Blackcomb, I use it so often to get my skis pointed in the right direction, perhaps setting up in the trees or entering a couloir, I don’t even think about it–it’s just another turn on the palette of turns. Check out the video to see just how you make one.

Tagged as: knowledge base, skiing