Ill be heading to Winter Park, CO to try some snowboarding (first time snowboarding attempt), and was thinking its probably not too much of a stretch to try snowkiting with the same setup using my surf harness and Soul 12m.

Ive been kitesurfing for 10+ years and am wondering how well that stuff transfers to snowboarding with a kite (no snow experience ever, lol)

Anyone here snowboard/kite the Grand Lake area?
Anyone just jump into trying snowkiting with zero snow sports experience? How did that go?
Should I just leave my kiting stuff at home?

TIA and Happy Wind Hunting!

I've always found it to be pretty much the same. Going from one to the other is still kiting at the end of the day. Same skills. The one thing I would say you may want to be alert to is the fact that regular 'all mountain' snowboards have a significant side cut to aid in turning while kite specific snowboards have a relatively straight cut. At relatively slow speeds you may not notice much but at 20-25 and beyond you will notice extreme vibration through the board. This is due to you trying to go straight but because you are on edge against the load of the kite the board is trying to turn. This sets up an oscillation as the board is going from straight to turn many times a second. Of course there are many variables here but the physics are the same. Now if you're in 2 feet of lovely fluffy Colorado powder you may not notice the effect much. Conversely if your on 2 inches of hard crust hauling the mail across a frozen lake then you'll see exactly what I'm talking about. All great fun of course just really smokes your quads within minutes. Any day kiting is a good day though in my opinion. Just an FYI. At the end of the day any old board will do if you're just looking to have some fun .

Have fun in Colorado. Hope they have good conditions out there!
Cheers!

I think your water skills will cross right over to snow kiting! I went the opposite way and it was pretty smooth.

For snow, I used a climbing harness (easier to fit over my winter gear and was super comfortable).

Excellent!

Thanks for the feedback, y'all. I may look into a climbing harness - I've been worried about how I was going to manage the harness I have

This is also a harness option:

https://ozonekites.net/proddetail.asp?prod=ozone_connect_sno...