North American snowboarders offer fresh perspective on Scotland’s Right to Roam

“O wad some Power the giftie gie us, / to see oursels as ithers see us!” It’s a pretty safe bet that Robert Burns wasn’t thinking of the Scottish snowboarding scene when he wrote those lines in the 1780s, but in snowsports as in all things, occasionally a little fresh perspective can be useful. The US-based ethical outdoor gear giant Patagonia recently released a short film called Right To Roam, which shows two of its sponsored athletes – Alex Yoder of the USA and Marie-France Roy of Canada – touring Scotland in Yoder’s elderly camper van, searching for scenic backcountry lines to ride. Given the snow-sure locations the duo hail from, you might expect that a film about their experiences of snowboarding in Scotland, particularly one made during one of the least snowy winters on record, would turn into something toe-curlingly awful; something, perhaps, like “Skiing in Scotland in Kilts”, the segment famously recorded by US filmmaker Warren Miller in 1996 which mostly focused on the food, the weather and what the instructors at Nevis Range didn’t have on under their kilts, and culminated in a deeply silly search for the Loch Ness Monster.