The Evolution of Snowboarding
Snowboarding’s family tree has many branches—and surprisingly deep roots.
It was a grey, cold Christmas day in 1965 when 35-year-old Sherman Poppen handed two nailed-together wooden skis to his 10-year-old daughter, Wendy, and her five-year-old sister, Laurie. The snow-covered dunes behind their house in Muskegon, Michigan, were the perfect venue to try out his new invention, though at the time, it was simply a way to get the kids out of the house on a day when the snow was too light for their sled.
Photo top: Tom Sims with some early boards. First board (1963) at far left, next to Flying Yellow Banana (1978).
Poppen’s wife, Nancy, stepped out onto the back patio to see her husband and the kids having a blast on this new device. She suggested they call it a “Snurfer”—short for snow surfer.
Wendy recalls the disappointment of having her beloved skis nailed together but says she and her friends continued enjoying the new creation. Her father saw the Snurfer’s potential and continued making improvements, which included adding a tether to the nose for steering. He eventually obtained a patent and sold the manufacturing rights to the Brunswick Corporation. The Snurfer was the first mass-produced toy of its kind and inspired the creation of what would eventually become known as the snowboard. By 1970, nearly one million Snurfers were sold.
Early Roots
While Poppen is often credited with being the inventor of the snowboard, he wasn’t the first to come up with the idea of sliding on snow on a single wooden plank. As far back as the 16th or early 17th centuries, people have been sliding sideways on snow in the Kaçkar Mountains in northeastern Turkey. They used a Lazboard, which was similar to the Snurfer but used a rudder-like stick for steering and balance.
In 1917, 13-year-old Minnesotan Vern Wicklund modified a sled so he could use it while standing, an idea he, along with Gunnar and Harvey Burgeson, would later patent as “Sno-Surf” in 1939. Like the Turkish Lazboard, the Sno-Surf relied on a rudder stick for steering and balance, while one strap and one rubber pad kept the rider’s feet in place. Like Poppen’s Snurfer, it used a rope attached to the front for steering and stability.
Birth of the Modern Snowboard
In 1963, 13-year-old skateboarder Tom Sims wanted to ride through the winter and created what he called a “ski board” in his seventh-grade shop class in Haddonfield, New Jersey. Sims launched a skateboard shop in Santa Barbara in 1971, and in 1975 he became the overall world skateboard champion. The following year he began manufacturing snowboards under the Sims brand. In 1983 he won the world snowboarding championships.
A year after the birth of Sims Snowboards, Maryland-based Bob Weber, who had patented a mono-ski and held the trademark on the word “skiboard,” reached out to Sims and his employee Chuck Barfoot and suggested collaborating on a new skiboard design. In 1978, the trio released the Flying Yellow Banana Skiboard. The design featured a molded plastic board with a skateboard deck mounted on top—a technology breakthrough.
Barfoot, who began his career making surfboards, helped Sims work up stronger fiberglass prototypes, then left in 1981 to start his own company. Sims continued innovating, adding steel edges in 1983 and adopting high-back and adjustable binding systems still in use today.
In 1972, Dimitrije Milovich dropped out of Cornell University and moved to Utah to work on snowboard prototypes, eventually obtaining patents and selling Wintersticks alongside Wayne Stoveken, who had written about “snow surfing” in Surfing Magazine in 1970.
Winterstick garnered national attention almost immediately, even before its official corporate launch in 1976. It still produces snowboards today, despite a hiatus between 1982 and 1994. Like Sims’ design, the Winterstick was revolutionary, built of polyethylene, polyurethane and fiberglass with foot straps instead of a rope. Some of the surf-inspired boards featured a deeply scalloped “swallow tail,” helping the front of the board float in the deep Utah powder.
On the East Coast, around the same time, a young ski racer named Jake Burton Carpenter was testing his own snowboard prototypes. Carpenter, who discovered the Snurfer at age 14 while living in Long Island, had been improving the model he owned—a process that eventually drew him away from skiing. After graduating from New York University in 1977, Carpenter worked for a mergers and acquisitions firm on Wall Street. But he saw that with a fast-developing market, the time was right to create a snowboard brand.
Within the year he moved to Vermont to launch Burton Snowboards, which soon became one of the most influential snowboard brands in the world.
The Challenge to be Taken Seriously
In 1979, Carpenter arrived at the Muskegon Community College National Snurfer Contest in Muskegon, Michigan, with his Burton board. It incorporated a waterski-like binding for the front foot, a grip pad for the rear foot and two aluminum “fins” on either side of the tail. It was such a radical departure from the Snurfer that he was initially disqualified. But New Jersey–based rider Paul Graves, who had been working with the Brunswick and JEM Corporations (both of which put the Snurfer on the map) intervened, and Carpenter was allowed to compete in a newly formed division of one.
“I kind of went against my sponsors and said, ‘If Jake can’t ride, then I’m not riding,’” recalls Graves. “And that ended up being the end of the original Snurfer movement. I also realized that this national event wasn’t helping us create a sport because it wasn’t taken seriously by everyone—there was a frat party element to it.”
The 1979 event was pivotal. It marked the transition from snurfing to snowboarding and came to be considered the first snowboard competition.
In the years following, other competitions would be organized and hosted by various snurfers and skiboarders. Then, in April 1981, Richard Christiansen and Tom Meservey organized the King of the Mountain Skiboard Competition at Ski Cooper, Colorado. It was one of the first times the sport was allowed at a lift-accessed ski resort. A small write-up of the event in Powder’s fall 1981 issue joked that “the majority of complaints filed were made by buoyant, though somewhat dazed skiers who had similar, recurring visions of skiers flying down the slopes via small surfboards,” a testament to the sport’s oddity at a ski area. Sims and Carpenter finished in the top three of every discipline: overall, slalom, freestyle and aerial.
On the East Coast, Graves was busy organizing his own competition. In 1982, Woodstock, Vermont’s, Suicide Six ski area hosted the first National Snow Surfing Championship, which eventually turned into the longest-running event in snowboarding history. The competition attracted national attention, including from the Today show and Sports Illustrated.
Graves sited the event on the hill’s steepest run, though most participants had never ridden a chairlift nor ridden groomed terrain. In the era before boards had steel edges, the hard Vermont snow produced what Graves remembers as “plenty of chills and spills.” He recalls, “When [Carpenter] saw the course before the event, he didn’t think we were going to pull it off.” But he told Carpenter, “It’s now or never.” Meanwhile, adds Graves, the management at Suicide Six decided afterward that it wasn’t actually ready for this type of event. It would be a few more years before the technology was adapted for use at ski areas.
Graves decided to step back temporarily, putting Carpenter in charge of the event in the following years. Carpenter, along with others, convinced the general manager of Stratton Mountain Resort to host the event in 1985. By then the name had changed to the US Open of Snowboarding. Many East Coasters remember it as the first time that snowboarding was allowed at a major ski resort.
Olympics and National Acceptance
By the time snowboarding debuted at the 1998 Olympics in Nagano, Japan, it was no longer an unknown sport. The nationally televised X Games had been ongoing since 1995; the sport had been featured in the 1985 James Bond movie A View to a Kill (Sims was the snowboarding stunt double for Roger Moore); and a 1979 Labatt Blue beer commercial featured Graves, Heingartner and Jane Hall snurfing. That commercial ran for four seasons and helped promote the sport to a North American audience.
Olympian Todd Richards recalls that during the 1998 Nagano Games, a faction saw snowboarders as “a bunch of hooligans on the hill” who didn’t deserve to be in the Olympics. Yet others were interested in seeing “zany, rebellious teens get upside down and crazy.”
Attitudes shifted by the opening of the Salt Lake City Games in 2002. The day of the halfpipe was sunny and warm, the Red Hot Chili Peppers played, and American men swept the podium. “That’s when I feel everything changed,” says Richards. “We kind of ushered in the generation of Olympic [snowboarders]. People saw during that competition that this could be the biggest thing. And they were right.”
The Fight for Access
As the popularity of snowboarding grew during its early years, so did ski-area operators’ disdain for the sport. Before the use of bindings or other measures to secure the board to the rider’s feet, before steel edges and polyurethane and plastic designs, Snurfer-era toys didn’t have the technology for controlled riding on hard-pack snow at ski areas. Most riders came from skateboarding and surfing communities and were unfamiliar with ski-area etiquette—and their determinedly rebellious attitude meant they were not welcome at resorts nationwide. Even a decade after the technology improved and major ski areas allowed snowboarding, the stigma remained.
Leading up to the 1982 National Snow Surfing Championship at Suicide Six, Graves spent two years trying to convince the ski area to host the event. “We were halfway between the transition from ‘snurfing’ on the snow toy to early snowboards that were ready to be used at ski areas,” he says.
Graves, who owned one of the first snowboard-specific shops in the country, in Woodstock, spent those early years lobbying ski areas and their insurance companies to get the sport accepted. Eventually, he learned that if he wanted to grow the sport, he’d have to convince ski-patrol managers instead of sneaking onto the property to hike up, hopefully unnoticed.
Rejection was frequent. In the fall of 1982, Graves gave a presentation to Stowe’s management, asking them to host the 1983 National Snow Surfing Championship. The response was a letter from Stowe’s public relations manager, saying, in part, “we will not at this time or probably ever allow snowboarding on our slopes and trails and it seems unfair to show an interest by holding a race merely for the publicity value to us.” The executive noted that he “felt a certain amount of negativism toward skiing by those interested in snowboarding. Rather than being a sport that co-exists with skiing, it seems to be more of a sport to replace skiing.”
Thus, when Carpenter convinced Stratton to host the 1985 event, it was a monumental step. In other parts of the country, snowboarders like Sims and the father-son duo Paul and David Alden were similarly lobbying to allow snowboards at ski resorts. In fact, the Aldens, who represented the North American Snowboard Association, convinced Breckenridge to allow snowboarding in 1984 by appealing to both the ski resort and insurance companies. (See Paul Alden’s obituary in Skiing History, July-August.) In January 1985, the Aspen Skiing Company agreed to an “experimental trial period” that would allow snowboarding on the Tiehack side of Buttermilk Mountain. These resorts set the precedent for others nationwide.
Snowboarders knew that they were under scrutiny, with resorts looking for a reason to kick them off the slopes. But they also knew that banning the increasingly popular sport meant leaving money on the table. The 1985 fall issue of International Snowboarder Magazine published a “code of snow-surfing ethics.” These included not riding out of bounds, being cooperative with ski patrol and being courteous to lift operators. The public service announcement advised to “impress them with your cooperation and skillfully controlled turning. Then, they may get excited over the hottest sport going.”
Status Check
In the late 1990s and into the 21st century, snowboarding even began to influence skiing in ways that remain today. Ski manufacturers adopted deeper sidecuts. Skiers competed in events invented by snowboarders, including halfpipe and slopestyle. Recreational skiing styles grew freer and more varied.
Ironically, snowboarding over the last decade seems to be returning to its pre-resort roots. As lift-riding skiers and boarders grow more sensitive to crowds and costs, the interest in backcountry riding has increased. Gear manufacturers have responded with split boards to enable climbing and surf-style boards for riding backcountry powder, similar to the Wintersticks introduced five decades ago.
But some boarders, like Richards and Graves, will never forget how hard they fought to get snowboarding accepted at ski areas. They’ll be sticking to the chairlifts they’re finally allowed to ride. 
Josh Laskin is a New Hampshire-based writer focused on outdoor adventure, travel and the environment. This is his first piece for Skiing History.