Take a Flier

If the venerable Minnesota pastime of ice fishing just isn’t your bag, why not try a new way of exploring the state’s 10,000 frozen lakes? Snowkiting. The winter variant of watersport kiteboarding, snowkiting will have you skimming across snow at 30 miles an hour on skis or a snowboard, in tow behind a 10-plus-meter kite.

No doubt you’ve seen snowkiters on Lake Calhoun, doing jumps and spins, their kites 100 feet above them. But if you imagine they’re all 19-year-old ski bums, think again. The average kiteboarder is 35 and has a six-figure household income, according to the sport’s flagship publication, Kiteboarding Magazine. In fact, entrepreneurs are some of kiteboarding’s core devotees. A recent piece in Fortune described a kiting area near Silicon Valley “often crawling with VCs, serial entrepreneurs, bleary-eyed engineers—even [Google founders] Larry and Sergey.”

“Wind sports were my motivation for starting my own company,” says John Zdechlik, of Minnetonka-based Z Systems, Inc., a video systems integration firm. Too many days looking out an office window at wind going to waste pushed him to get a more flexible schedule. Zdechlik says kiteboarding is like business: “It’s the nature of the sport—it weeds out posers and people who don’t want to apply themselves.”

Tenacity is key; the learning curve is steep and falls can be spectacular. With your kite lying flat on the snow at the far end of 100-foot lines, you launch it by jerking it against the breeze. The trick is to keep diving your kite from side to side in a figure-eight pattern without crashing it or losing your balance. This movement across the wind creates lift and powers you across the snow. Sounds simple, but it takes serious multitasking and coordination.

Mark Kedrowski won a snowkiting competition last year by going 63.4 miles per hour. The CEO of Blue Earth Interactive in White Bear Lake says the sport is a complement to the Web-application development work he does—similar in that there’s a lot going on at once, “but the tranquility and level of focus [in kiteboarding] is meditative.”

A starter kite set-up will run you upwards of $1,500. Expect to pay a few hundred dollars more for a full-day lesson. (You’ll need that or something close to it to get started).

Tighe Belden, director of the LAKAWA School of Kiteboarding in Minneapolis, says most of his students are working professionals between 30 and 50 years old. “You see people out there at 3 p.m. and you think, ‘Do these people have jobs?’ All of them have lives, but they make it work out,” Belden says. “Most employers are supportive of having a passion—you end up with better employees.”

Zdechlik takes kiting vacations and brings his equipment on business trips, including a recent one to Las Vegas, where he went kiteboarding on Lake Mohave. But Minnesota is a winter and summer kiting destination. Daniel Ogden of extremeairstore.com had been selling equipment on line with a partner for four years when they opened a store in Minnetonka last March. Minnesota was “a virtually untapped market” then, and he’s seen local sales growing steadily.

Ogden puts the whole subzero season in a new perspective: “Minnesota is awesome in the winter because you can just walk out onto any frozen lake.”