Snow Dynamics

Humble Beginnings: how snowboarding started

How many of you know the name Sherman Poppen? I’m guessing very few. You might kick yourself as I did when I tell you that he was the man who started it all; had Sherman, a devout snowboarder, and his wild vision of surfing the Rockies not played out as it had, we might have all found ourselves doing something very different with our time. Who’s to say that Extreme Ironing wouldn’t have taken off? Instead of turning on TV and seeing some dude blasting into the air out of a snow-pipe, we may well have been racing out with our ironing boards to the nearest hill. (Complete with super fashionable carbon fiber iron..)

By all accounts Poppen was an extravert. He didn’t give a monkeys uncle that everyone thought his idea was a bit on the daft side, he made his prototype beauty, and he was proud; one meter twenty long and wrangled roughly out of two children’s’ skis joined together. As the legend goes, Wendy, his daughter, was the only person who thought it was any good when her dad gave it to her as a birthday present.

You might think that was it, the snowboard established, but nope. The idea vanished out of sight—although Poppen sold a few and his friends thought it was OK, it was already dead in the water. It wasn’t until the 70s that a surfer called Dimitrije Milovich, an east coaster, started it all up again, unable to think of anything else.

But no, that soon died too. By 1980 his company—renowned as the first snowboarding company in history—was flat broke, too.

At the same time a number of other people were having a go: the likes of Jake Burton, Tom Sims, Bob Webber, and Chuck Barfoot—who brought fiberglass into the frame—helped put snowboarding back on track.

So, if you’ve got an outrageous idea and think it has legs, don’t listen to anyone! Who knows? Maybe it’ll go somewhere…

Before I go, there is a great site that you all need to check out on enigin PLC, I really like these guys and I hope you will all support them as well!