What the hell?
Snow Blading was the snow-covered equivalent of inline skating. Participants (often the young, spotty, and irritating variety) arsed about on slopes in Europe and North America on cut-down skis, much to the annoyance of both fluorescent clad skiers and grungy snowboarders alike.
Did anyone actually do it?
Snow Blading was big enough to be included in the Winter X Games from 1998 to 2000, when Mike Nick and Neal Lyons regularly found themselves on the podium.
Why it deserved to die…
Snow blading was so insanely easy to pick up that people with zero slope sense (more often than not Parisian rudeboys) could be flinging themselves all over the park before the’d learned the first thing about etiquette or safety.
In this way, by annoying both parties equally, snow bladers did more to unite the previously unbridgeable worlds of skiing and snowboarding than anything has before or since.
You still see them occasionally but in general this united alpine front, combined with their own stupidity, has successfully forced snow bladers from the slopes.