WHILE THE KITERS sleep in the Alamo church, I swing by a library in the 12,000-person town of Williston to watch a presentation by the volunteer educators, who, all told, will spend six weeks crisscrossing the state on a budget of just $3,500.

Tonight's turnout is decent: two youth groups, a few adults, and a local reporter. The presentation begins with a surprisingly cool video of kite-skiers catching big air and then shifts to a scary montage showing the effects of global warming. The speakers—a produce manager at a food co-op and two undergrads—take turns leading an interactive multimedia presentation, at one point asking the kids to write letters to the governor, before culminating with a staggering fact: North Dakota's wind energy could meet one-third of the country's electricity needs. But it currently provides only 2 percent of the state's electricity needs.

Despite a few certifiably crackpot questions—for example, "Didn't the eruption of Mount St. Helens spew more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than mankind has ever produced?"—everyone seems genuinely interested in finding the best solution.

And it's not just here. Ultimately, the education crew will speak to more than 7,000 people, while local newspapers, radio shows, and TV stations will cover 2XtM more than 40 times.

What will come of all this is hard to say. Enthusiasm for local wind power is growing slowly: a group of Benedictine nuns installed two turbines in west-central North Dakota to power their convent not long ago, and bigger projects are coming online as well. (State wind production doubled last year, thanks largely to Florida-based FPL Energy's completion of a 106-turbine farm in northeastern NoDak.) But the coal industry is powerful, running ads daily on TV and radio, and harnessing the breeze fully will require costly new transmission lines to Minnesota and Chicago. The education crew knows they can't take on the coal lobby directly, but, still, I can't help but wonder if they wouldn't do well with more than a token letter-writing campaign to lure politicians to their cause.

Unsurprisingly, 2XtM's target audience—the students—remains blasé. "Climate change is only news to people who don't pay attention," one high schooler informs me after the presentation.

"So what struck you most?" I ask.

"Getting 150 feet of air," he replies.

Which, it turns out, isn't that easy to do. Toward the end of the trip, the education crew offers me a kite-skiing tutorial. I've never done it before, but I can ski, and I can fly kites, and I can tumble end over end, so why not?

The lesson starts with just the kite, as they show me how to tilt the steering bar so that the kite swoops in large figure eights, pulling steadily on the climbing harness around my hips. Piece of cake! After a half-hour of practice, I borrow skis and boots and am soon skipping back and forth at nearly 20 miles per hour, leaning hard, dragging my knuckles like a pro. Tacking: no problem. Catching air: Maybe I'll try that later. Heading any direction other than across the wind: painful.

As I try to angle upwind, back toward where I started, the kite luffs, I glide underneath it, and then it billows and pulls my lower body roughly opposite the direction of the skis. Every ligament in my knees strains with the twist and I collapse onto my elbow, only to be dragged across the snow-covered lake like an outlaw lassoed to a galloping horse. After a few more attempts, I crumple the thing up and shuffle back to the boat landing, convinced that snowkiting long distances is a bit like rodeo clowning: It's kinda fun and funny, but a good day is when no one gets hurt.