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Say it ain't so!

After years of pious, purist principles, Taos Ski Valley finally slid over the edge.

The Free Taos crowd has won and, come March 19, the legendary ski slopes of Taos will allow snowboarders. If you love to hit the winter slopes, you are either cheering or groaning.

Sometimes tradition needs to give way to to change. But it will be interesting to see whether this last year of traditional downhill skiing at Taos will be a banner year or whether next year will be the beginning of record runs at the ski area.

While controversial, the decision probably was inevitable, as the number of snowboarders continues to grow, while the number of skiers is either static of shrinking.

Unthinkable before now, the decision - as The Tribune's Sue Vorenberg reported Saturday, in "Mixed reactions to Taos boarders" - is drawing fire or salutes, depending on whether the critic is a skier or a boarder.

Boarders say it's about time. Traditional skiers say the ski-area owners caved to financial lures.

But everyone agrees it will be the end of an era at Taos, which experts usually rank in the top 10 most challenging mountains in the country, with some ranking it among the top five.

Taos was among only a handful of ski areas in the country to still prohibit snowboarders, typically a much younger set. Boarders not only seem to steam traditional skiers with how they fly down a mountain but also with what they do to the mountain on the way down.

"Boarders tend to slide down a hill and shave off the bumps (called moguls)," said Brian Munn, of Albuquerque's Sportz Outdoor. "Skiers like to move around the bumps, which is the fun thing."

He is among skiers worried that boarders will change Taos' reputation for the worse, because they "will change the character of the mountain."

You wouldn't think it wouldn't be that big of a deal, but the battle has been raging since boarding began to grow in popularity, and increasingly so over the last two decades.

Obviously, most ski areas have allowed snowboarding rather than risk losing that revenue to competing slopes that allowed them. And an increasingly important part of that equation is that more and more families or groups of friends included one or more snowboarders. So if they want to continue playing together, they had to pick ski areas that allowed snowboarding.

In effect, Taos wasn't just discriminating against snowboarders, it was turning away entire groups that otherwise would have loved to ski the fabled challenges of Taos' slopes.

Albuquerque skier Jo Porter represents that group, telling Vorenberg that she hasn't been able to ski Taos for years because her 25-year-old daughter is a boarder.

That was the prime reason for the change cited by Adriana Blake, a member of the Taos founding family and marketing manager for the resort. She said simply, "It was time," based on surveys that suggested a lot of families couldn't consider Taos because someone in the family was a snowboarder.

Among those cheering the loudest is Free Taos co-founder George Median, who also is co-owner of Experience Snowboards in nearby Angel Fire. Battling since 1994 to open Taos to boarders, he's thrilled by the decision but wonders what to do with all those bumper stickers.

Taos' Blake said the ski area has been getting praise from snowboarders looking forward to a new day, but she expects a lot of traditional skiers will ski Taos slopes this year in "mourning."

It's a big mountain and, as they have at other ski resorts, "knuckle-draggers" and "two plankers" will learn to get along. And given the annual march of global warming, who knows how long anybody will be skiing the slopes of Taos?