Upbattlers are just the tip of the splitboarding iceberg

Last weekend, Cairngorm Mountain played host to the latest edition of the Upbattle – a lighthearted celebration of the still-niche but increasingly popular sport of splitboarding. The sun shone, the snowpack held up and attendees were able to try out new gear, learn new skills and – if they chose to enter the annual Upbattle splitboarding race around Coire Cas – watch Lesley Mckenna and Dan Braund becoming increasingly tiny specks in the distance as they won the women’s and men’s categories respectively.

For those not well-versed in the ever-evolving world of snowsliding, splitboarding is a relatively recent development – a form of snowboarding that allows both uphill and downhill travel. Back in the bad old days, snowboarders were faced with a seemingly intractable dilemma. While their boards worked just fine on ski resort pistes, they knew that there was even more fun to be had in the deep, untracked powder that lay just beyond the resort boundaries. A high-speed turn on a piste tends to be all scrape and chatter; generate enough speed in unbroken powder snow, however, and the turns are smooth, effortless, and almost completely silent. It was undoubtedly a feeling worth suffering for. Trouble was, accessing those powdery playgrounds really could be a waking nightmare.

Skiers have never had much trouble getting around in deep snow – after all, when stone-age hunters first started using skis in Northern Europe, they weren’t thinking about slalom races but how to get from

A to B without sinking up to their oxters. Skis, then, were designed with backcountry mobility in mind. Snowboards? Not so much. In fact, if you were trying to come up with a way of making somebody’s deep snow journey exponentially more difficult, you might hand them a snowboard. “What’s that? You’re sinking up to your knees in the snow every time you take a step? Here, try carrying this large heavy plank!”

Clearly, something had to be done, and as early as 1990 a bright spark called Nicolò Manaresi from Bologna patented a design for a snowboard that could be split into two skis and equipped with climbing skins for uphill travel. It wasn’t until the following year, however, when Brett “Kowboy” Kobernik brought a splitboard prototype to Mark Wariakois, the founder of US backcountry ski manufacturer Voile, that splitboarding began its long, slow journey into the mainstream. Voile released the first DIY Split Kit in 1994, which enabled snowboarders to saw their boards in half and turn them into splitboards. Not long after that, the first off-the-shelf splitboards became available, and these days there are various companies offering these all-terrain craft, from Voile and Jones Snowboards in the US to Salomon and Rossignol in Europe.

The drill for transitioning from downhill mode to uphill mode could hardly be more straightforward: remove bindings; split board in two; reattach bindings in “walk” mode; attach climbing skins to skis; extend collapsible ski poles... and you’re ready to go. Still, it took a surprisingly long time for splitboarding to gain acceptance. In 2009, former Scotland on Sunday journalist Richard Bath suggested that I should attend one of Neil Mcnab’s legendary backcountry snowboarding courses in Chamonix. Great, I thought, I’ll bring my shiny new splitboard. Even then, however, although Mcnab and his friends were using splitboards themselves, they didn’t recommend using them on their courses. We would be going to some pretty remote places, I was informed, and if you start losing nuts and bolts from your splitboard up on some glacier somewhere you’ll be scuppered. All backcountry travel that week, then, was undertaken using good, old-fashioned snowshoes, our snowboards strapped to our backpacks (apart from the day we used a helicopter which, it turns out, is an even more efficient way of getting to the top of a mountain than a splitboard.)

I’d had my first taste of splitboarding the previous winter, while staying with my friend Anna in Revelstoke, British Columbia. She and her pals were all keen ski tourers and they thought it would be funny to have a snowboarder puffing along in their wake. Lessons learned on that initial go-out included: 1) If you slide the skis forward gently, you will make good progress; if you try to lift them up and stomp them down like snowshoes, however, you will burn about a thousand of calories a minute. 2) If you don’t have breathable gear, you will pickle in your own sweat. 3) Even if you have all the wrong gear and no idea, travelling uphill using a splitboard is still a hundred times easier than travelling uphill hauling a conventional snowboard.

Anyway, three decades on from Nicolò Manaresi’s brainstorm, splitboarding is now exploding in popularity – a report by market researchers NPD Group suggested splitboard sales in the US were up some 92 per cent last winter. And more folks earning their turns can only be a good thing – just ask the Upbattlers.

Market researchers suggested splitboard sales in the US were up some 92 per cent last winter