TELLURIDE – On a mild early February day, Mark Worth sits atop Lizard Head Pass in a camp chair scribbling on a white board. With arrows indicating wind direction, he describes concepts like “headwind vector,” “turn radius,” and “angle of the dive,” as a small group of students listen intently.

Next, he picks up a wood-and-wire model of a snowkite, offering a three-dimensional visual of the scientific aspects that make up the sport of snowkiting.

Hearing Worth, a longtime master of the sport, describe being jettisoned across the snow by a wind-propelled kite is akin to listening to a college professor delivering a lecture. This is a man who has spent many years studying his specialty, and here he is now, at the top of Lizard Head Pass, sharing his erudition with a few locals hoping to learn this up-and-coming sport.

“There are elements of surfing, skiing, even Tour-de-France style biking” within snowkiting, Worth explains. And as for the physics part of the sport, which requires some working understanding of things like aerodynamics Worth is able to break it down into simpler terms. He uses an example of an eight-year-old sticking his hand out the window of a moving car. If the boy keeps his hand flat, it will cut straight through the air; if he tips his pinky downward, his hand will shoot upward.

Now, it’s just a matter of taking the hand-out-the-window concept and applying it to a kite that is tethered to your body.

Worth ditches the white board and the model, gathering up a couple of snowkites as he and his students descend into the wide, treeless flats adjacent to Hwy. 145. It is there, on Lizard Head’s snowy expanse, that Worth’s deep knowledge of the various physical components of snowkiting meets the one element that draws enthusiasts of the sport – adrenaline.

“It’s a fun and exciting sport because you can harness the forces of wind and gravity, and use them to amplify the power and energy you put in with your own body,” he says.

Worth’s teaching background actually comes from his expertise in snowkiting’s sister sport, kiteboarding. As owner of Gorge Kiteboard School, he has taught more then 2000 kiteboard lessons at Hood River on Oregon’s Columbia River Gorge since opening the school in 1999. That same year he began snowkiting on Telluride’s Lizard Head Pass, which ultimately lead him to open Telluride Snowkite School last season.

Judging from the number of cars that pull over to watch Worth and his students practice, it is clear that snowkiting is still something of a novelty sport, at least in this part of the country. First documented in the late 1960s and early 1970s, snowkiting has gained popularity in Europe in the last decade and is slowly gaining ground in the U.S. It is perhaps best recognized in the freestyle ski world, where adrenaline junkies use snowkites to move uphill as well as down, catching massive amounts of air. Although the sport’s extreme, cliff-hucking fringe is possibly the most publicized aspect of the sport, Worth explains that snowkiting is accessible to everyone.

“It’s a sport that appeals to a lot of different people on different levels,” he says. “You have the extreme end, where people are snowkiting in steep terrain and flying off mountains, but you also have the people looking for the more mellow experience of just cruising around in a meadow.”

Worth expects to see more and more snowkiters cropping up, not just in ski towns like Telluride but across the country, since snowkiting is a sport that can be pursued almost anywhere. “It doesn’t require a big mountain – you can snowkite virtually anywhere that there is snow and wind,” he says, noting that he foresees the sport becoming attractive to a growing spectrum of people.

Through his monthly Locals’ Beginner Clinics, held the first Tuesday of each month at 1 p.m., Worth is hoping to introduce more Telluride residents and visitors to snowkiting. He notes that while he created the clinics with locals (and their budgets) in mind, they are open to everyone.

A Women’s Beginner Clinic is being offered Tuesday, March 9.

The beginners’ clinics are designed to introduce novice snowkiters to the sport, including an outdoor classroom lesson, learning to set up the kite, launching, flying the kite in power strokes and landing, as well as learning to use the kite's power to move across the snow and make turns. They are “an attempt to make snowkiting accessible to everybody,” says Worth.

Clinics cost $75 per person and include instruction as well as shared use of a kite. For more information about Telluride Snowkite School, to sign up for an upcoming clinic, or to schedule a private lesson with Worth, visit www.telluridesnowkite.com.