About a decade ago, two California snowboarders decided they didn’t want to let a little thing like no snow keep them off their favorite slopes. So they retreated to the workshop. Before long, fueled by that gonzo West Coast alchemy made possible by too much nice weather, the mountainboard was born.

The unholy lovechild of a snowboard, a skateboard, and a mountain bike, a mountainboard can handle a greater variety of terrain than any of its forefathers alone. Even so, mountainboards have only started to penetrate mainstream pop culture consciousness.

Now the Blue Ridge is about to have its consciousness raised in a big way. On July 31, the RIDE (Rolling in Dirt Everywhere) Mountainboard Tour will roll into western North Carolina for the RIDE Championships, an event that promises to draw the best professional mountainboarders from around the world.

“On a mountainboard you can ride over ridiculous things. Ditches. Big rocks. Grass. Dirt. Even the street,” says Justin Rhodes, a co-organizer of the RIDE Tour and one of mountainboarding’s biggest boosters in the Southeast. “It opens up whole new possibilities compared to skateboard riding,” Rhodes says. “It also beats out snowboarding because you don’t need snow. You just need a hill.”

For the uninitiated, a mountainboard looks like a skateboard on steroids. Or a snowboard with wheels. They run almost four feet long and weigh about 15 pounds. The wheels themselves are eight inches in diameter. They feature knobby tires and are mounted to suspension systems adapted from mountain bike technology.

Unlike skateboards, mountainboards have bindings that hold your feet to the board. But unlike snowboards, these bindings don’t lock your feet in completely. Riders can slide out of the bindings easily, which can make a crash much more forgiving than a typical snowboard face plant. The RIDE Championships will take place at the Holler Mountainboard Park in Fletcher, N.C., just a few minutes from Asheville. Rhodes built the park himself some two-and-a-half years ago. Holler combines elements of the traditional skate park, the BMX track, and downhill mountain-biking courses to create a dirt-covered paradise for catching big air and accelerating to high speeds. Two types of event will go down during the day’s competition.

DirtBoarderX is an all-out downhill race where four riders per heat each try to get to the bottom first. At speeds reaching 30 miles per hour, they negotiate bumps, banked turns, and big drops en route to the finish line, though their biggest obstacle tends to be each other. “Crashes are guaranteed,” Rhodes says.

In the Big Air event, riders get five chances each to show off their best aerial tricks. Judges pick the best six jumpers, who move on to a 45-minute jam session, where they get in as many tricks as they can as music plays and an emcee calls the action.

Over the past few years, mountainboarders have reached new heights of aerial extremity. Last year saw the first double back flip in competition. The 1080-three complete aerial rotations-has been successfully executed. And the superman-a move lifted from freestyle motorcross, where an airborne rider’s feet will leave the board completely and extends his or her body horizontally while only the hands remain on the board-is now commonplace.

Despite the hardcore accomplishments of its top practitioners, mountainboarding’s appeal extends beyond the extreme sports realm, Rhodes says. You can cruise grassy slopes on a mountainboard, ride gravel forest roads, or shred many of the same singletrack and doubletrack trails mountain bikers do. Beginners will often equip their mountainboards with a brake to control its speed. And at Holler, they can practice jumps and tricks into a foam pit to cushion their landings.

“People are scared of [mountainboarding],” Rhodes says. “That has a lot to do with the way that new ideas and concepts take a long time for the public to accept. It took snowboarding over thirty years.”

Yet with the blistering pace of innovation in outdoor sports in general over the past decade, it seems the acceptance curve has shortened. Always hungry for a new high, Blue Ridge athletes have shown an extreme adaptability for trying new things, whether it’s in a boat, on a bike, or on a board. With the RIDE Championships bringing new visibility to the sport here, you may soon see a mountainboard on a trail near you.

-Marcus Wohlsen