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Deserts, Yaks and Outright Lying: 10 Weird And Wonderful Ways To Go Skiing Without Snow

No Snow? No Problem. Here's How To Get Your Planks On When Waiting On The Snow...

It’s a hard time for us skiers at the moment – watching wonderful edits drop week after week of pros shredding beautiful, picturesque snow and being unable to get near any of the stuff ourselves.

Fear not though, because once you’ve exhausted your local dryslope or snow dome, we’ve got just the next steps you need to take while you’re waiting on winter.

Here are 10 unconventional ways to (kind of) appease your ski addiction (ish) until that glorious snow flows back into your life…

1. Go Riding In A Tube Station

You’ve probably all seen this wonderful video before. Rumour has it, this budding skier just got so fed up of not being able to get out his planks every morning that he just took them on his commute one morning and went for it.

Filmed at Angel station, on the longest escalator in the London underground network, this clip makes us smile every time – so grab your skis and get going!

2. Get A Back Garden Set Up

Every so often we see a sick summer set up from some kids that have transformed their garden into a full on dryslope park.

Other times, and much, much more frequently, we see budding skiers and boarders who have tried to do just this, but have dramatically failed and can’t even get their skis going downhill. You could still give it a try though…

3. Get Your Water-Skis On

This is one of the more legitimate points in this post. Water-skiing can be pretty awesome, and it kind of involves skis – the word at least – so it kind of counts…

True, you won’t get the same smell of snow and powder hitting your face when you land, and you’ll probably be in a small cable park or the freezing North Sea rather than in the shadow of Mont Blanc, but it’s still pretty fun.

4. Abandon Your Family For Foreign Snow

Tired of your workload, your friends and your family? Filthy rich and have millions of pounds waiting in an off-shore bank account? Then do we have the game plan for you.

There may not be much snow in Europe at the moment, but there’s always snow somewhere – Chile, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, and more places over in that general direction in this case.

Get your private jet at the ready, get Jenkins the butler to pack a bag (or get his servant to do it for him), and start your jet-setting fun now. And know that everyone you know, including us of course, is incredibly jealous.

5. Go Roller-Skiing…

The title of this particular pointer read’s ‘Go Roller Skiing…’ but, in actuality, you should never, ever go roller skiing. For obvious reasons.

These guys are the same micro-scooting, roller-blade crazy fiends trying to bring everyone’s day down by looking incredibly lame. Hell, we’ve given you nine other great options for alternative skiing in this very post, so you really have no excuse for attempting this…

6. Give Yak Skiing A Shot

What do you mean you’ve never heard of Yak skiing? It’s what all the cool kids in the Indian hill resort of Manali are doing!

The sport involves attaching a skier at the bottom of a slope to a Yak at the top of it. The skier then shakes a bucket of nuts, which makes the Yak sprint down the hill towards the food, and, subsequently, forces the skiier to shoot upwards.

“Never shake the bucket of nuts before you’re tied to the yak rope though,” warns Peter Dorje, the pioneer of the sport. “If you shake the bucket too soon, you’ll be flattened by two hairy tons of behemoth.”

DON’T SHAKE THE BUCKET TOO SOON.

7. Pretend Your Skiing On The Roof Of A Car

This is much like an urban version of Yak skiing, although it doesn’t involve the death-defying procedure of shaking a bucket of nuts, and it’s not actually skiing at all.

Nevertheless, if you get going on some nice roads around the city, cars revving around you and wind blowing in your face, you’re only one pair of headphones and a handful of LSD away from convincing yourself you’re in Whistler.

8. Buy A Copy Of Ski Resort Tycoon For Just £0.01 On Amazon

This PC game was, and always will be, mildly entertaining. Don’t judge me for thinking so. I’m judging you for disagreeing. Or high-fiving you over the insane state of my gnarly virtual resort.

This game, out in 2000, let you make black runs, mogul fields, snow parks, hotels, restaurants… everything you need to convince yourself you’re actually on a ski season, but without the hard work! You can literally get the game for one singular pence on Amazon – before the hard hit of £2.03 for postage and packaging.

9. Go Skiing In The Desert

This one kind of makes sense. If you’re in the Sahara, chilling in Dubai, or are generally just surrounded by sand dunes, look out those sticks and get gunning on the sand.

This shit has been going on for generations now, although if you’re in the UK and planning to travel across the globe to get involved, you’d probably be better just heading to one of the actual snow zones outlined in point four of this post.

This does look like a hell of a lot of fun though. Give it a go at your local British beach…

10. Convince Yourself You’ve Been Skiing Through Extensive Lies

It’s often said that if you lie enough about a particular topic, you believe to believe it’s actually true yourself. So do that!

Get a fake goggle tan, photoshop yourself into some photos from the Alps and some insane edits from Argentina, lock yourself away in your room for a few months, and tell your friends and family that you’ve gone out shredding!

This is the poor person’s answer to actually travelling around the world for some summer snow, as was previously discussed in point four.

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