How to Side Hill Drop on a Snowmobile - Pro Level Riding Tip 2 of 4

What's up guys, Caleb Kostierki here, and today's episode is part two of a four-part series called Pro Riding Tips. For today's episode, we are going over sidehill drops. A sidehill drop becomes an extremely useful maneuver when you spend a lot of time riding pillow zones. In fact, I would say it's almost impossible to ride pillow zones at a high level without this maneuver. So learning this is going to give you a lot of control in your sidehills and a lot more route options being able to drop off little cliffs. The first ever sidehill drop I did, I actually recorded. I was trying to get this high line up above a pillow and lost my momentum because it was super deep, and I just ended up going right off the cliff. And then it all started clicking in my head like, oh, I can actually learn this and do this consistently and add this into my toolkit of maneuvers. So I started practicing them, and then obviously they just escalated to the point where I was landing sidehill drops harder than I would a regular drop. And then ever since then, I kind of toned it down a little bit, and now I just kind of do them as needed in tech terrain. For practicing this maneuver, you're going to want to be really selective about what type of pillow you use. You want something that is shelved out a little bit to kind of help keep your sled on edge so your back end doesn't wash off the lip of it. You want a relatively steep angle to land on, and you want to make sure you're practicing this in deep snow because as you're learning this, you're going to be landing in all kinds of different ways on your side panel, and you could just really get messed up if you're practicing this in harder snowpack. Like anything else, as you're starting out, you want to use a small pillow and slowly work your way up. You do want to make sure that your sled is getting into the air and completely out of the snow, so I would say a pillow that's anywhere from like three to six feet is a good height to start working with, and I'll show that in the demonstration. I'll show different sized pillows and what it looks like, but you know it's just important to remember that you can't go for like a 15-foot cliff right off the bat. We want to minimize risk as much as possible by starting small and working our way. I'm going to throw my GoPro on and just cruise around this zone and find pillows and walk through why that pillow is good or bad for the demonstration, and then once I do that, we'll switch back to the camera view and walk through this just like the last one. So this pillow right in front of me is a pretty good pillow to practice on. What I would do is side hill in, coming towards us like this, come off the corner of the pillow, and land somewhere in there between this up track and that down track. Kind of hit that pocket. So that would work good. This one right here could also work good, but it's a little small, so you're not really getting a feel of a side panel drop. It's more of like a side hill wheelie off a pillow. So I think I might use this one for demonstration. I'm going to keep riding around and see what else there is in this zone. This pillow could work good, but there's this little knuckle here that you'd have to clear, and that could potentially kick your sled downhill in a weird way. So I wouldn't use this one for practice, but once you're good at them, you could actually pop off the corner of that in a side hill and clear this knuckle and land in between these two tracks. I'm on top of this gap pillow right here and figured I'd just demonstrate this so you can see it. It looks really small from up top, but you guys saw it from down below and know what it looks like. I'm going to really have to preload the skid hard to clear that little gap, and I'm gonna have to lay the sled over into the hill extra hard too to make sure I don't get tossed. Here's another good pillow. The way this one's set up, it's a little lower consequence, and this would be a good demonstration. It's a little on the small side, but still big enough that your entire sled would be in the air as you come off this. So there's four different pillows here that look pretty good. That one, that one, that one, and that one. They're all really small, but they'd be great practice ones. Not very technical to get into them. Clean run out below. Deep snow, like it's nice and soft in there. That one has tracks in it, so that makes it not as good, but the rest of these are pretty mint. So I'm gonna go grab Luke now, and we'll switch over to the camera view. Just like before, I'll demonstrate one and then walk through my trench and explain how to do it. I really liked this demonstration I just did. I did make a little mistake. I pulled the sled over just a little bit too hard, so my back end landed a hair low, and I kind of had to pin and wiggle out of it. But besides that, I would consider this a textbook side hill drop. There's a lot of variation in side hill drops. Some of them, you're gonna have to carry momentum off. Some of them, like this one, you can get your skis right to the edge. That's my preferred way of doing it. The more momentum you have, the harder it is to land. My ideal situation is like this, where I pull up and have both skis in the snow. My right ski was really light on the snow or barely in it at all. My left ski was nice and planted. Ski loops near the end of the drop here, just like you would do on a regular cliff drop. Difference is that this rock is kind of angled at a weird angle. So I get lined up. Mentally, I'm preparing, spotting where I want to land. I'm obviously in a wrong foot forward position here, and I give it a bunch of throttle, freeload the skid, lay it over as it's coming off, almost like carving off of this. You have to keep in mind though, the skis are leaving the snow, so you're not really carving based off what the skis are doing. You're carving based off how the track is chewing off. Your foot position on the running board is going to be determined by how much ski lift and pop you need to get off of this. If you're coming off in a more horizontal angle, like some of the other demonstrations, your foot can be a little bit farther forward. On this one, I had to keep the front up as I was coming off, so I had my foot a little bit farther back. There's not really a right or wrong. You just want to think about coming off the lip and also your landing, and how you can brace the best for both of those activities. So sometimes if you're landing really hard, you can take your outside foot and put it on the running board so you have both legs absorbing the impact. It's just going to depend on the drop and how you do it. If my sled is laid over into the hill a long ways, then I'm going to keep just one foot on the running board. If that angle of the sled is planted more, I'm going to have two feet on the running board. And then, you know, sometimes you're in between and you just have to make a judgment call of which one you think is going to be best for you. The angle that you come off your drop is going to be determined by a couple things. One is how the cliff angle up here pans out. Making sure that you can get proper pop and get your sled laid over off the lip is really important. And then the second thing is your run out. On this one, I threw it pretty hard to the left because I was locked into this angle off because it's a finger here. I couldn't pick any other angle. Then I also had a tree there that I had to avoid so I couldn't go that way. I have trees below me so I couldn't go that way. So I was kind of isolated to this window and I had to compensate for the lack of line options with riding skill and make it happen right here. Generally speaking, picking an angle more horizontal to the hill is going to help your landing not be as harsh. The more distance obviously you're going to drop and the harder you're going to compress into the sled. So if the cliff is lined up perfect to have a completely horizontal side hill off, I would do that. But again, you know, you just have to work with the terrain that you're in. Something to note is this outside foot pretty much always gets bent and tucked behind my running board foot. That does two things. One, if I want to put it on the running board, it's right there to stomp onto the running board. And then two, it's a lot less vulnerable landing into the snowpack with this leg under you rather than out in front of you like this. If this foot goes out in front of you, like say same type of position you do on a downhill u-turn, it's really vulnerable to get jammed up and injured. So I always take this and kind of tuck it behind. Not behind, but tuck it back and bend it. That way the side of my thigh is getting compressed into the snowpack and it's in a safe position. As safe as it gets when you're doing this type of thing. The two things that mess me up the most on this are washing out when I land or getting bucked downhill and kind of thrown off the sled. The reason for those things happening are landing with the sled tipped into the hill too far. If I land with my sled angle over like this, obviously that back end is just going to kick out when I get on the throttle. And if I land to roll downhill, as soon as I land, the sled is going to want to lay flat. So there's like this happy medium and you just kind of have to pick something and go with it. It's going to take a lot of tries to get a feel for it, but you're picking some angle between this and flat. And if you get that angle perfect, it's not going to toss you. Once you land, you're going to try to regain your momentum. How you land is going to determine how you get going from that position. So once again, if you land tipped into the hill, you're going to roll the sled down and kind of pin and wiggle out of it. Just like I did on this demonstration. If you land with your sled rolled too far downhill, you're going to give it throttle again and you're going to counter steer and try to regain that edge as quick as possible. Being on edge is always where the control is at. So especially in terrain like this, we can afford to lose our edge for a split second, but then we got to regain it right away. One last important thing when you're coming off the lip of the cliff, I was talking about leaning the sled over and kind of like carving off it. And that is what you want to do, but I just want you to be really careful not to tip the sled over too early. If you tip the sled over too early and give it a bunch of throttle, that back end is going to wash out off the cliff or you're just going to trench in and you're not going to get that forward momentum. You need that track kind of oriented flat in the snow pack. Start getting forward momentum, start getting that ski lift up and then tip it after. That sums up this maneuver. I hope you guys can find a good safe spot to practice these. And then once you get them down, start putting them to use in tech terrain. The next episode is going to be on wheelie mastery. So be sure to check that one out if that's something you're interested in.