This is the second of three installments of a series that focuses on snowboarding – examining the early years when the snow sport was forbidden, it’s humble beginnings, and its eventual rise to prominence.
Because the sledding wasn’t going well on Christmas day with his daughters, Sherm Poppen sought something different, eventually fastening two skis together to create a new toy that could smoothly slide down the scenic snow-covered Lake Michigan sand dunes behind his Muskegon home.
His girls – 10-year-old Wendy and Laurie, 5 – immediately embraced dad’s innovative creation. When Poppen and his girls got home later that afternoon in 1964, his pregnant wife Nancy was fixing dinner and heard the story from her excited daughters about surfing down to the shoreline on the stand-up board.
An engineer and inventor who owned Lake Welding Supply Co., Poppen didn’t let the idea die there. He was on to something and knew his latest invention needed a name. Nancy solved the problem, dubbing it the Snurfer – for snow-surfer. Who knew the then crude invention would one day be recognized as the foundation of modern snowboarding?
It took a while for the plan to reach fruition. Poppen applied for a patent in 1966 and licensed the Snurfer to Brunswick Corporation, which prior to that was producing bowling equipment in Muskegon the previous 61 years.
Poppen quickly began working with the factory to mass produce the Snurfer. Thanks to a local toy distributor, sales took off nationally with 750,000 Snurfers sold by Brunswick and Jem Corp over the next two decades. It was so popular that in 1968 Brunswick sponsored an annual Snurfer racing championship in Muskegon.
The Snurfer was embraced in any region nationwide that received snow. In Sacramento, a couple of young kids quickly embraced the winter sport, enjoying it on day trips to Camp Sacramento, located off Highway 50 near South Lake Tahoe.
“My brother (Pat) and I had Snurfers when we were kids. We would scream down a (sledding) hill at Camp Sacramento,” recalls Tim Briggs, who grew up in Sacramento and now calls Folsom home. “But very few people I’ve ever talked to have ever heard of them.”
BURTON ENTERS THE PICTURE: Jake Burton Carpenter was another kid who was enamored with “Snurfing” and started competing in the Brunswick-sponsored races. But he didn’t stop there. Through ingenuity, Carpenter took Snurfers to another level, founding Burton Snowboards Inc. in 1977 and building the first 100 prototype modern-day snowboards by hand in his Londonderry, Vermont garage.
In 2002, Carpenter told a reporter – “The Snurfer definitely inspired me. It was sort of a cult type thing at the time. It was something I embraced right away.”
Because he needed more space to increase productivity, Carpenter eventually moved the company to a Vermont farm in nearby Manchester, where his snowboard operations began to grow. He and wife Donna spent the late 1970s and early ‘80s serving as snowboarding ambassadors, giving the new sport legitimacy in every way imaginable.
Jake organized events, provided individual lessons, and spent much of his additional time tirelessly working to improve the product. But his greatest challenge was trying to convince ski resorts to let snowboarders on their slopes. The Carpenters often traveled from resort to resort giving demonstrations and making pitches for the benefits of lifting the snowboarding ban.
Carpenter didn’t limit his snowboarding production to the U.S. The first Burton European manufacturing company was established in 1985 at Austria’s Keil Factory. Today, Burton operates offices in Australia, Canada, China, Japan, and the Republic of Korea.
Carpenter certainly was instrumental in building the sport, but he had help. Other notable snowboarding pioneers included Dimitrije Milovich (founder of Winterstick in Salt Lake City), Tom Sims (founder of Sims Snowboards), David Kemper, who founded Kemper Snowboards, and Poppen’s Snurfing company.
Although Donner Ski Ranch in Lake Tahoe would disagree, Suicide Six Resort in Pomfret, Vermont is often credited with being the first U.S. ski resort to allow snowboarding in 1982. That same year, the inaugural National Snowboarding Championships took place on an icy run at Suicide Six.
RISE OF SNOWBOARDING CULTURE: In its infancy, snowboarding was truly an outlaw sport that skiing folks didn’t want around. In fact, many skiers hated it. Undeterred, snowboarding created its own culture, characterized by a rebellious attitude, sense of adventure and a propensity for pushing the limits.
Outsiders from the mainstream, the snowboarding culture of the late 1980s and early ‘90s was heavily influenced by alternative music. Their preference was punk rock, heavy metal and hip hop. This music was helpful in generating a community among snowboarders and helped to define the sport’s unique identity.
The outlaw snowboarders were mockingly referred to as “knuckle draggers.” The name and the alternative image were rampant in the early 1980s in Lake Tahoe and nationwide, where snowboarding was almost universally forbidden.
Snowboarders eventually developed their own unique places to go on the mountain, frequenting areas called jibs, rails, boxes, and halfpipes. And they developed a new language as well – boarders, kickers, booters, freeriding and more.
In 1983, Sims organized the first official halfpipe competition at Soda Springs in Lake Tahoe as part of the World Snowboarding Championships. The event attracted snowboarders from across the country, including Carpenter and his Burton team.
After a slow period of acceptance, ski resorts nationwide began easing the ban. By 1985, an estimated 40 U.S. resorts began welcoming snowboarders, even though some resorts required assessment tests to ride and they were allowed only on certain designated runs.
After years of being restricted to the Lake Tahoe backcountry and a handful of smaller resorts, Tahoe’s riding scene received a major breakthrough in the spring of 1987 when Squaw Valley allowed snowboarding on a trial basis for the remainder of the season. The next season Squaw officially opened to snowboarding.
Three years later (1990), snowboarders were allowed on roughly 476 resorts throughout the country and sport was welcomed into the Olympics in 1998. By 2000, Snowboarding was the fastest-growing sport in the U.S., with the number of boarders rising to a total of just over 7.2 million.
