"Mike M. Miskulin" wrote

Can you talk more about your mogul technique? And does it
vary depending on soft/hard bumps? Steepness? Narrow trail?

Ugh.. I can, but by no means I'm a mogul expert.

First off, I think that trying to ride moguls makes you a
much better overall rider. Moguls teach you a lot about
separation of upper and lower body, about weight transfer
and balance over the board. If you feel like you've reached
some sort of plateau and stopped progressing your smooth-slope
riding - go ride some moguls.

Now, I think there are a few key things with riding moguls.
First and most important is this very hard thing of leaning
forward. Bacically, your body should be perpendicular to
the slope, and your shoulder line should be parallel to the
BACK side of the bump. Which, on black slopes, is almost
falling down face-first, at least it sure feels like that.
This is very unnatural and it's very hard to fight the natural
urgency to lean back to the mountain. But without leaning
forward you are completely hopless on moguls.

Second, it's the infamous "relax and commit" thing. Again, it's
more of a phsychological barrier, because you'll be ways out
of your comfort zone which in turn makes you stiff and worsens
the technique quite a bit. As ridiculous as it sounds, sometimes
I have to just go get a stiff drink if things don't click - helps
me to relax a bit and get things flowing. Oh yeah, and there's
the usual "look way forward", three moguls ahead at minimum.

In steep mogul runs what I'm doing is essentially aiming for the
top of the next mogul with my weight on the front leg and knees
bent only a little. The key here is to keep as much weight on the
front of the board, because otherwise you just won't be able to
use it to turn - the board needs to grab with the front part of
the edge. When I hit the top (front) side of the mogul, the board
is pointing almost perpendicular to the fall line. Make a very
deep squat, absorb the energy of the impact with the mogul. At
that point the upper body is still traveling along the fall line,
so I almost "go over the handlebars". With knees bent and weight
way forward I slide the board off of the top of the mogul, and
then jump to unweighten the the board and rotate it in the air to
point at the top of the next mogul, changing from heel to toe
side or vice versa in the process. Loop to the beginning of the
paragraph here, until too tired or reached the end of the mogul
run

I think the dynamics are no different from what skiers are
doing, so you can observe good skiers doing the moguls and
do the same on the snowboard.