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Cave drawings suggest that people in what is now Scandinavia were gliding over the snow on skis more than 5,000 years ago. And it’s believed that Polynesians had been using boards to skim over ocean waves at least 1,000 years before explorer James Cook described surfing in the Hawaiian Islands in the late 1700s. So it was perhaps inevitable that one day somebody would combine skiing and surfingto create a fun new sport. What is surprising is that it took so long.
The sport that came to be known as snowboarding is only about 40 years old, but its popularity has grown at a phenomenal pace. Dismissed at first as a diversion for rowdy teenagers, it now ranks second only to skiing among winter sports in the United States. Snowboarding officially came of age in 1998, when two snowboardingevents were included in the Winter Olympics at Nagano, Japan. At the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, competitors in the six snowboarding events include professional athletes with international reputations and multimillion-dollar endorsement deals and their own lines of designer clothing and snowboarding equipment.
Snurfing USA
No one can say for certain who first tried sliding across the snow ona single board. Some trace snowboarding’s origins back to 1929, when M. J. “Jack” Burchett of Utah reportedly crafted a snowboard out of a plywood plank that he secured to his feet with clothesline and horse reins. His feat was considered significant enough that Burchett and his snowboard were featured in one of the semifinal designs for the recent U.S. 25-cent coin commemorating the state ofUtah.
Modern snowboarding, however, began in 1965 when Sherman Poppen, an engineer in Muskegon, Michigan, invented a toy for his daughter by fastening two skis together and attaching a rope to one end so she would have some control as she stood on the board and glided downhill. Dubbed the “snurfer” (combining snow and surfer), the toy proved so popular among his daughter’s friends that Poppenlicensed the idea to a manufacturer that sold about a million snurfers over the next decade.
In the early 1970s, Poppen organized snurfing competitions at a Michigan ski resort that attracted

enthusiasts from all over the country. Some of those competitors and others inspired by the snurfing craze soon began experimenting with new designs that would advance the sport of snowboarding immeasurably bythe 1980s.
One of those early pioneers was Tom Sims, a devotee of skateboarding (a sport born in the 1950s when kids attached roller skate wheels to small boards that they steered by shifting their weight). As an eighth grader in Haddonfield, New Jersey, in the 1960s, Sims crafted a snowboard in his school shop class by gluing carpet to the top of a piece of wood and attaching aluminum sheetingto the bottom. Sims began manufacturing his own line of snowboards in 1977 and went on to become a snowboarding champion and a stunt double for actor Roger Moore in a snowboarding scene for the 1985 James Bond film A View to a Kill.
In the mid-1970s, Dimitrije Milovich—an American surfing enthusiast who had also enjoyed sliding down snowy hills on cafeteria trays during his college years inupstate New York—constructed a snowboard called “Winterstick,” inspired by the design and feel of a surfboard. Articles about his invention in such mainstream magazines as Newsweek helped publicize the young sport.
The most successful of the early designers of snowboards was Jake Burton Carpenter, a Vermont native who had enjoyed snurfing since the age of 14. In 1977 Burton impressed the crowd at aMichigan snurfing competition with bindings he had designed to secure his feet to the board. That same year, he founded Burton Snowboards in Londonderry, Vermont. The company still ranks as one of the leading manufacturers of snowboards and snowboarding equipment in the world.
Despite snowboarding’s increasing popularity, ski resorts were loath to embrace the new sport. Snowboarders, mostly young...