Snowkiting: Excellent Thrills, and a Pretty Good Chance of Survival

Question: After discovering that one could travel over water at dangerously high speed by standing on a board and hanging onto a giant kite, how long did it take "sports enthusiasts" to try the same stunt on snow?  Answer: As long as you would expect it to take someone who enjoys travelling at twice the speed of the wind.
Snowkiting, the nordic version of kiteboarding, is a new sport, and Geezer fears that its longevity may depend on the ability of boarders to stay alive long enough to tell others how much fun it is. In this piece from the Boston Globe, world traveling writer and photographer David Arnold reports on such fun from Kitestorm, New England’s third annual snowkiting festival, which drew 1,000 kiters to Lake Champlain. Arnold tells us that snowkiting "may be the only sport where you go up faster than you come down. There
are no lifts, no lift lines, no lift tickets, and no out-of-control
skiers and snowboarders threatening from above. In fact, there is no
above; there’s no hill — or hardly any gravity, so it seems."
Even better, Arnold’s piece reveals that the odds of survival are surprisingly good–at least, surprisingly good for a sport that allows one to jump 100 feet off the ground. In 2004, more than 2,000 snowkites were sold in the U.S.,  and so far, only two snowkiters have been killed. Read more about snowkiting.