Skateboarding or snowboarding? For ages, the debate over which is harder has raged. At first I always agreed that skating was ten times harder, but over the last few years I might have begun to think a little differently. To silence these inner demons I decided to try a little experiment to see which was truly harder.

Skating Test

Skateboarding has been around longer (and since it’s what snowboarding "steals" from), I started there first. Dress to skate, I headed to the mountains. A foot of new snow had fallen the night before and the halfpipe had filled in, so I loosened my trucks and went for some powder turns. I hardly made it four feet when my griptape became a sheet of ice; needless to say, my feet kept sliding off the deck. I might have had the wrong hardness of wheels because I just couldn’t get any speed. After becoming frustrated by falling over instead of turning, I tried to bomb-drop off an eight-foot cliff, which simply resulted in the making of a three-foot "bomb" hole.

Snowboarding Test

For the second part of this experiment, I donned the proper snowboarding attire and headed to the skatepark. As usual, I being a "snowboarder" felt a little uncomfortable around the skaters. Hopping around the park was a breeze. The only problems I had were getting speed to launch out of the bowls, with the edge control (there was none), and a bunch of kids laughing at me.

The Result

It’s true, skateboarding is harder than snowboarding, but in all reality, we’re comparing apples and oranges. No matter how badly you want to, you’ll simply never know the joys of a stand-up frontside five-0 on a snowboard, just as you’ll never have the joy of a steep pillow line on a skateboard–these examples could go on and on. Next time I’ll try to discover which is harder, football or hockey.