Snurfers to Snowboards
Art: Bob Commander
Snowboarding in Utah? For many moons, that was little more than a fantasy. For all intents, it had the ingredients of your basic oxymoron (like “jumbo shrimp,” “airline food,” “adult male” and others). No more. Today, although two of the state’s ski areas still outlaw the sport (Alta and Deer Valley Resort), snowboarding is rampant, not onlyon formal mountain trails and terrain parks but in the vast backcountry tracts of the Wasatch. Snowboarding is no longer just the “shredders” — the teens and ’tweens and mavericks who pioneered riding nationwide. Today, it’s not uncommon to see parents riding with their peewees down the runs at most Utah resorts.
Dmitrije Milovich, a card-carrying icon in snowboarding — he invented the Winterstick, one of the first snowboards, more than a generation ago as the sport was in its infancy — laughs as he thinks about his introduction to snowboarding in Utah as a transplant from the New York metro area. “Snowboard scene? There was no snowboard scene — that was 1972. Jake Burton [founder of the eponymous snowboarding equipment company] was still riding his Snurfer,” according to Milovich, now head of Radius Engineering in Salt Lake City and long removed from Winterstick, although the name continues under other owners.
“There was no ‘scene’ because there were no snowboards,” he says.
Today, though snowboarding still may not necessarily be “mainstream,” the sport is no longer dominated by the rebels and outcasts, self-anointed or otherwise, who had to hike their way into backcountry caches to ride. Park City Mountain Resort’s Jupiter Bowl, once off-limits to riders, is a great playground for snowboarders, and The Canyons Resort offers some nice off-piste riding back up and away from the growing base area, too.
Early Utah riders were attracted to the vast backcountry of the Wasatch, hiking up to, among other stashes, Grizzly Gulch, across from Snowbird, to ride the snow-covered mounds of mine tailings. “It’s still the epicenter for gap riding — launching off one pile of tailings onto another — and it’s just a fun scene,” according to Park City’s Nathan Rafferty, president of Ski Utah but also a sometime-rider. “I love to ski too much, but the truth is, I got a ’board a few years ago and I still beat up my body a couple of times a year on it. When I’m on a ’board, I’ll look at a piece of terrain with my skier’s eyes and think I can handle it — and I’m usually wrong! But I’ll ride again this winter because I want to improve.”
Ski Utah partners with RideUtah.com and Burton in promoting the sport and its various incarnations, from simple basics to rails and terrain parks to backcountry. “My 4-year-old son told me he wants to try snowboarding this year and I said, ‘Don’t you ever say that word again in this house’ but,” Rafferty continues with a smirk, “the reality is snowboarding gets people outside, too, having fun outdoors ... and we want people having fun on snow.”
Perhaps locals Ricky and John Bower are the poster people for multi-generational riding. John was a two-time Olympic Nordic combined skier and U.S. Nordic director for the U.S. Ski Team. Having grown up in Maine, skiing was in his DNA ... and yet as a 50-year-old, he was converted to snowboarding by his teenage son, Rick. John first tried snowboarding in 1992. Rick had taken him over to Snowbird and explains, “Dad was still skiing, and there was a foot of powder. He saw how my board planed, and I think right there he said, ‘Well, that looks like fun’ ... and that was it.”
When John went to the Olympics in Albertville, France that year as U.S. Nordic director, he brought his snowboard instead of his cross-country skis!
Rick Bower went on to become halfpipe gold medalist at snowboarding’s 1999 World Championships. He was also head coach of the Park City Snowboard Team for a year. “There was snowboarding years ago, and some good riders from Utah,” Rick, now a halfpipe coach with U.S.
Snowboarding’s national team, says. “But as far as competition goes, there wasn’t a lot because the only pipe was at Park West [now The Canyons], and they didn’t maintain it. They expected the riders to come up and get it ready. So, until we started seeing machine-worked pipes, it didn’t seem like a lot of people focused on that kind of riding, although, yeah, Cammy Potter won that halfpipe medal at the 1996 World Championships.”
“We’d go and ride the pipe, but we’d mostly go free-riding,” Bower adds. However, in 1995 when the first U.S. Snowboard team was named, Bower went to a World Cup at Oregon’s Mount Bachelor and his eyes opened wide. “I got to experience a really good pipe. Utah didn’t get any until more recently, when Park City Mountain Resort dropped its ban before the Olympics and then stepped up and built really world-class terrain parks.” (Park City Mountain Resort then went on to host the snowboarding events at the 2002 Olympic Winter Games).
Though snowboarding isn’t allowed at Deer Valley Resort, that doesn’t mean resort staffers don’t ride elsewhere on their own time. Chuck English, director of mountain operations at Deer Valley (and a surfer growing up in California), is in his 26th season at the resort. He savors his time on a ’board, even though it’s on other mountains. “It’s a whole new way to experience the challenge of a mountain. I don’t take anything for granted on a snowboard, so I have a whole new set of eyes and see things differently than how I’d see them if I were on skis,” he says.
“My wife was always intimidated to go skiing with me, but when I’m on a ’board, we have a great time and really enjoy it. I ride and she skis. And,” English adds, “When I’m skiing every day at work, it’s sometimes nice to do something different on my day off.”
Photographer and cinematographer Richard Cheski, another Park City resident, grew up in Hawaii and fell for snowboarding. “I come from a surfing background but when I saw free-riding, I said, ‘I’m going to Utah.’ I was sitting there with a skateboard injury and I’d seen the back page of magazines, people ‘surfing the snow’ in Utah. I’d ride at Park West with Ricky Bower and other locals ... and now people ride all over. I’m getting more and more requests for ‘snowboard family’ photos these days.”
It’s not a job, but a lifestyle for Cheski, who says, “I’m too addicted to riding for my age [37]. I’ll do 150 - 200 days a year. Being able to ride into mid-June in Utah ... well ... no complaints.”
Freelancer Paul Robbins, a regular contributor to Park City Magazine, has written about snowboarding since the first U.S. Snowboard Team was selected more than a decade ago.
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