IF YOU'RE looking for East Surrey's answer to skiing, go no further than the Ride The Hill mountainboard centre.
The complex, off Sandy Lane in Nutfield, is a hub for mountainboarding – an action sport that combines snowboarding and skateboarding across slopes, grass hills and woodland courses.
Ride The Hill has been running for 12 years and last month staff and riders were busy celebrating the completion of a new ramp.
Explaining the sport, owner and manager Alison Twomey told the Mirror: "Mountainboarding is a cross between snowboarding and skateboarding and it's very much open to everybody, from age eight to 80 – if you're fit and want to have a go, that's fine."
Mrs Twomey has run the centre, which includes several slope runs of varying difficulty, for the last two years.
Last month, members of staff and riders from across the country joined together for a launch party celebrating the completion of the new ramp.
She said: "People who travel down to ride here from all sorts of areas were able to stay and camp. We had a barbecue and a sunset ride, it was a brilliant day."
The new quarter-pipe ramp has two heights available for riders to try out, a 12-foot and an eight-foot.
Mrs Twomey explained why the centre was now offering two heights: "The 12-foot is for the more experienced park riders and the smaller one is for youngsters to give them a chance to start using it – not beginners but those who are the more intermediate riders.
"We are trying to create a more family image. People tend to find it a bit scary because they go on YouTube to see what mountainboarding is but obviously on YouTube it's more of the big jumps.
"The level that people [would] come in and start at is grassroots level."
To make things easier for riders, the centre has a ski tow-style lift, so they never have to walk back up the top to do it all over again.
And for beginners, Ride The Hill offers lessons to suit all experience levels.
One of the centre's instructors, Will Wright, said: "The main reason I started is because I had done skateboarding and it looked like fun but because it's such a small sport everyone in mountainboarding knows each other and it's very much a community sport."
For more information visit www.ridethehill.com
