Sherman Poppen can’t possibly have been the first man to think of an alternative to ski’s, but he was certainly the first to do anything about it. Sherman was a surf freak and had the crazy notion that it might be a lot of fun to surf the snow, so he set about trying to fashion a snow surfboard, snurfboard anybody? After a spell in his shed he emerged an hour or two later with two plastic childrens ski’s bolted together, with a rope attached to the front to steer. His daughter Wendy was the first recipient and after initial misgivings and quite a bit of eye rolling she took to it, so did her friends. The word spread and one year later in 1965, the “Snurfer” went into production. Over the following 10 years he shifted a million units at $15 a pop. It proved to be something of a fad however and the “Snurfer” fizzled out as quickly as it had fizzled in. And there it might have ended but it seems like you can’t kill a good idea who’s time has come and snowboarding’s time had come. A skateborder, Tom Sims took up the baton, then another keen surfer, Dimitrije Milovich, who up until this point had done his snow surfing on tin trays, developed the “Winterstick”. Further innovations followed, one important upgrade being the addition of water ski foot traps to facilitate steering, the Snurfer slowly morphed into something like the modern snowboard. 

By the mid seventies, surfers and skateboarders had adopted the snowboard and gave it a cultural identity and the street cred to go with it, the jargon and the clothing quickly gaining currency, a new life style was born. This could help to explain why almost every resort and most skiers, world wide, were very sniffy and downright hostile towards these upstarts on those new fangled contraptions. The pioneers, in most cases had to infiltrate at night, walk up the trails and ride down secretly. It wasn’t long though before the demographic changed and snowboarding became a universal phenomenon. By the mid eighties the first World Cup event was held and by 1998 it had truly come of age and had been embraced by the Olympics, becoming an event in it’s own right. Today it’s estimated that 80% of kids who practice winter sports choose snowboarding. Looks like the tables are slowly turning.