My first time mountainboarding in Montana yields a beauty of a scrape

Yesterday I went mountainboarding for the first time ever in Montana. I decided to just ride one of the gravel roads that lead up into the mountains. I drove to this one road which led up to the Jewel Basin Hiking Area trailhead. I drove part way up the road, and proceeded to continue up it when it started to climb just to see what I was in for, but I hit some potholes and bottomed out, so I decided to turn around, park, and just check it out on the hike up.

I had brought my iPod along with me, because I was pretty sure that it was going to take a little while to hike to the top. Well, I was right: it took me an hour and 45 minutes to reach the top. An hour and 45 minutes! That was a huge hike, especially in full pads with a mountainboard strapped to my back!

I arrived at the top, took a breather and had a bite to eat, turned around, and started rolling back down. I began with my tires at 40 psi, but I knew that the top was flatter than the bottom half, and 40 was still way too high, so after one powerslide or two, I stopped and let some air out to what was probably about 25-30 psi. I kept rolling on down with that, and that was still incredibly fast! The roadway was just such a hard surface, as there basically wasn't any loose gravel on it, that you would just accelerate quickly and keep accelerating.

As I was throwing my next powerslide, I failed to completely commit to it and my front tires caught and I flipped over forwards. My board went flying off the edge of the roadway and down the mountain about 10 feet or so, and I landed on my left forearm. My elbow pad got pushed up, and I basically slid solely on my left forearm along the frozen, graveled road surface , stopping less than a foot from the edge of the road. I got up, and my arm felt like it was on fire! I was sure that it was just a scrape, so I just pulled my elbow pad back down and went to retrieve my board.

Here's what I got out of it:

(This was taken more than a full day after the fact, so it is pretty much already all scabbed up.)

So 25ish psi was way too much, so I let my tires down to maybe 10 psi -- almost nothing. The tires were way soft, and yet I had to continue to throw powerslides every couple of feet all the way down. The entire ride down (including tire adjustment) took me a half an hour, so it was definitely a blast, but a load of it was powersliding. The road was just to narrow to carve up, unless I had extremely loosened my trucks up. But if I had done that, I would have speedwobbled like crazy if I had gone fast at all. So powersliding was the name of the game. I usually don't powerslide a whole lot, but by the time I got to the bottom I felt like a pro at it. To give you an idea of how many slides I had to throw: I started out with a brand new glove that had literally never been worn before, and by the time I reached the bottom, I was left with this:


It was quite the experience!