Spring can be a sad time for snowboarders, with the good-riding times of corn snow and long days numbered. But all is not lost—as the white stuff melts away, or if you're far from the frozen slopes year-round, sandboarding may satisfy that yearning, and for some even replace it.

The ride down might just put snowboarding to shame. "It feels like you're flying," says Lon Beale, the publisher of Sandboard magazine. According to Beale, the sport itself may have been around in one form or another for more than two millennia, with the fun-loving ancient Egyptians and eighth-century Chinese having skidded down dunes during festivals.

More recently, sandboarding hitched a ride with the sixties' surfing craze, though it has since lost out in media lovin' to snowboarding. The chariots of these 20th-century sandboarders weren't much more advanced than their dune-blazing predecessors: enthusiasts fastened their feet onto car hoods, surfboards, and scraps of cardboard, to name a few of the more creative constructions.

However, the development of more highly attuned sandboards responsive to different types of dunes kept pace with snowboard design and actually borrowed a lot from snowboard research. "Now, the boards will do almost 60 miles per hour," says Beale. In 1998, Venomous Sandboards introduced Race Base, a surface specifically designed to handle sand firm enough to propel sandboards over the 50-mph mark.

Sandboard pilots strap on a board, usually with a base coated in wax (with different compounds suited to different types of sand) and a laminate like Formica, then clamber to the top of a dune on foot, aboard a dune buggy, or—at a sandboarding resort in Hirschau, Germany—by hopping on a chairlift. Boards range in length from about 100 centimeters (think longboard skateboard) to a snowboard-sized 160 centimeters or more, depending on if the pilot is looking for air, doing tricks, or carving wide, high-speed turns. A pilot can stick bare or bootied feet into slip-on bindings or sport boots and buckle down with snowboard-style bindings.

As the sport grows in popularity, look for dune hunters to find better and wilder places to ride. Although not considered significantly more ecologically damaging than other adventure sports, sandboarders do need to choose their sites carefully. Areas with dune grass are a big no-go, as damage to the roots of this grass will essentially collapse the fabric that binds the sand together. Ecological sensitivity goes with wax on the boards, too—not just any old floor polish will do, as the residue can end up in the creeks and water tables below.

Like on the ski slopes, sand parks with jumps and rails are adding a skate-style feeling to the sport. In the U.S., sandboarding's participants number about 14,000, but in places like South America and Australia, the sport's picking up popularity even more rapidly. The U.S. National Sandboard League now sanctions six events annually, while dozens of international sandboard competitions bring the sand people out for glory and a place to rip when the snow's out of season.
Pioneer: Josh Tenge

Since 1999, big-air master Josh Tenge has slid into top spots at more than 20 sandboard huckfests. Growing up shredding concrete and wet snow of the Pacific Northwest, he was a second-year snowboard instructor at Diamond Peak Ski Resort in Incline Village, Nevada, when a friend suggested he try sandboarding. Less than two years after his first ride, he entered the 1999 Sand Master Jam competition in Dumont Dunes, California, and tied for first with Peruvian champion Marco Malaga, whipping the seasoned pilot in the big air and freestyle events. "No one saw me coming," says Tenge.

Tenge, 25, now shuttles back and forth between the snow of Lake Tahoe and the sands of Florence, Oregon, and owns the Guinness Book of World Records entry for the longest-distance back flip, a 44-foot, ten-inch monster at the 2000 Xwest Huck Fest in Sand Mountain, Nevada. That may be about as high as you can get: as the dunes get steeper, they start to collapse on themselves.

"I'm doing stuff on snow and trying to bring it over to sand," he says. Front and back flips, spins, even switch riding—rarely seen on a sandboard—are all coming out of Tenge's snowboarding arsenal. Next year, he plans to head down to South America to see how he stacks up against the southern hemisphere's pilots, who've been riding on sand all their lives. "All those guys are true sandboarders," he says, "it's all they do."

Tenge, who teaches both board sports to aspiring riders and pilots, gets people hooked into the sport by taking his board out to Oregon's Honeyman Beach State Park when it's crowded. Unassuming vacationers frolic in the waves until Tenge and other area riders hit the dunes. "We freak everybody out, and they all want to find out what's going on," he says. But it won't always be like this. "I see it blowing up at some point," he says. "There's too many kids out there who need something like this."

Even though he seems to have taken to the sport, he still says it's not easy—tricks on snow can take years to perfect on sand. But he enjoys dismissing the naysayers. "Every time I go out, I usually prove somebody wrong."