Have you ever snowboarded in Europe in the summer? If not then it should be top of your to-do list for 2018! Whilst it necessitates an earlier start to a day snowboarding in the winter, you’ll usually finish up riding in the slush around midday and still have plenty of hours of daylight left to cram in more activities.
Summer glaciers are only too aware that their off-season offerings are never going to be world class compared to their mid-winter groomers, so will vie for your shred dollars by putting on a whole host of other options like swimming pools, skateparks, pump tracks, mountain biking, kayaking, hiking trails, paddleboarding, trampolining, luge tracks and pole-vaulting. OK, so we made that last one up, but we haven’t even got to the parks yet.
Everyone knows that park riding is more fun in the spring when the sun shines and everything softens up, so it follows that when it’s even sunnier and slushier in the summer it just gets better! Granted, your options are limited, but it’s arguable that the likes of Les Deux Alpes and Zermatt actually do a better job of park shaping come June than they do in the winter.
Need more convincing? This classic piece of penmanship by Chris Moran on the joys of slush should do the trick, but for now let’s just crack on with finding out where you can snowboard in Europe this summer, and which destination is thew best.
“Everyone knows that park riding is more fun in the spring when the sun shines and everything softens up, so it follows that when it’s even sunnier and slushier in the summer it just gets better!”
DISCLAIMER: Yes, WE KNOW we’ve left out dryslopes and snowdomes. C’mon, most of the current Whitelines staff line up cut their teeth and skinned their elbows on Snowflex, but as these aren’t exactly seasonal by definition we’ve focused just on glacier snowboarding.
