When Nick Terry gets stressed out, he can hop on his snowboard and hit the slopes outside his office.

That's one benefit he enjoys as snowboard school director at Afton Alps, the ski, snowboard and snow tube destination near Afton State Park on the eastern edge of the Twin Cities metro area.

What is there to get stressed out about?

Consider this: At the height of the season, the self-proclaimed "snowboard czar" will oversee 120 instructors, all of them part time and most of them around 18. Along with Afton Alps' 160 or so ski instructors, they'll teach close to 20,000 ski and ride lessons.

And this: A lack of actually getting out on the hills and snowboarding can often get pretty stressful too, according to Terry, who has had his job for five years and previously taught part time at Afton Alps while studying marketing and art at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls.

"Sometimes I feel like I work at a ski hill and I don't snowboard enough," Terry said. "For me, I'd snowboard day in, day out, all the time. But I've also got to do this office part of the job."

Whatever season the calendar says it is, it's board season of one kind or another for Terry — snowboards in winter, longboards in the spring, wakeboards in the summer. The boarding is fun but the real appeal is spending time with his boarding buddies, he says.

Our motto is safety, fun and learning. We want to hire people who have a good head on their shoulders, can think on their feet and have good stage presence. As long as you keep your students safe and have fun with them, chances are they're going to learn something.

It takes the average person three times to be able to confidently skid or link turns. Then they start exploring their surroundings. Snowboarding doesn't get fun until you've done it for a couple years, until you can get the snowboard to do what you want.

Moonlight Basin (Montana). It was riding pillows the whole day down. That's the cool thing about powder. You can be going 40 or 50 miles an hour and it's completely silent. I had a guy tell me the first time you ride real powder, it's a religious experience. That is definitely true.

Here I have to be professional. When I go out west on my snowboard trips, it's buck wild. I go nuts. I probably overcompensate. Not only in my nightlife but in my snowboarding too. That's nice but sometimes it gets me into trouble.

Move someplace warm or find a way to look at winter positively and do something. We're cold for four solid months and have two on each side where we're not exactly warm either. If you're not doing something fun, that's a good six-month chunk where you're just sitting around and that doesn't do it for me.