Snowboard design catches its cutting edge

The history of snowboards reveals early influences from surfing and skateboarding; modern technology is now changing the game

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      Try to imagine a world without snowboards. It seems like these rectangular pleasure planks have been a feature of Vancouver’s winter-sports scene forever.

      Wrong. When the Georgia Straight published its first Winter Adventure feature on snowboarding in 1987, the skateboards on steroids were still regarded with apprehension by many established ski operations, including Whistler Mountain. Forward-thinking destinations like Mount Baker, Mount Seymour, and Blackcomb Mountain—a rival upstart to the Whistler Mountain Ski Corporation, with which it merged in 1997—embraced the new breed wholeheartedly.

      Peter “P D” Ducommun took up snowboarding in 1980. At the time, the founder of Canada’s oldest skateboard company, Skull Skates, said the scene was so tight he knew all five other Vancouver riders. “Snowboarding has always felt like it’s followed behind skateboarding,” Ducommun told the Straight during a recent visit to his Point Grey shop, where he unveiled a new edition of his Crystal Ocean brand snowboards, the latest in a line that stretches back to 1985 and his first pressings since 2001.

      Ducommun said the original snowboard design concepts were misguided: “The notion early on was that you should be able to surf or skate on snow. The mindset was all about creating them like surfboards, complete with swallowtails. The early Burton boards even featured a rope through the nose adapted from toboggans to help drag the board uphill because there was no way we were getting on the lifts.”

      The challenge of how to carve turns was something else again. “Without bindings, you had to try to hang on. It was considered cheating to be attached to your board. When you look at a lineup of early snowboards, that paradigm reveals itself. If only we’d thought to make them like a single ski on which you stood sideways. Sidecuts came into play as an afterthought only after we realized how difficult it was to stand on one edge.”

      Reflecting on advances in early Canadian-made snowboard designs, Ducommun singled out Barfoot boards, modelled in Calgary by Neil Daffern in the mid-1980s, as the first to feature flexible tips and tails. Daffern, who died in a helicopter crash in 1990, followed up that innovation with the world’s first twin-tip board, which he created with Ken Achenbach. (That design feature, first seen in skis in 1974, didn’t receive wholesale adoption by ski manufacturers until 1997.)

      With time came a grudging acceptance of the new sport by one Lower Mainland operator. “Hemlock Valley was the first place that would even think about allowing us on their hill,” he recalled. “They needed the dough but said because of insurance liability, we couldn’t ride the chairlift while wearing our boards, but it would be okay if we could figure out a way to wear skis while carrying our boards. So we strapped on little plastic skis to go up and then hopped onto our boards to go down.”

      Last month, Ducommun mounted a retrospective display at his store to honour snowboarding’s lineage. Citing a like-minded skateboarding exhibition he curated at the Museum of Vancouver in 2004, he said it took skateboarding quite a while to build up a history that people could appreciate.

      “Gradually, over the past five years, the same thing has come to apply to snowboarding. When I look back at the construction techniques from the 1980s, the boards look so archaic. I built up a collection that I wanted to share so that everyone can enjoy the sport’s history. These days, everything is vaporized by the constant distraction of social media. Most of us can’t even remember what happened last year, let alone three decades ago when Vancouver was positioned just right for us to start snowboarding on the North Shore when the first models appeared.”

      Ducommun marvelled at the latest design features. “When I stopped making snowboards in 2001, I thought, ‘What else can they do?’ But Rob Dow at Endeavor has taken things in whole new ways.”

      Taking that as a cue, the Straight visited the Railtown offices of Endeavor Design Inc., where the five-person staff, including Dow and company president Max Jenke, were celebrating their second-place finish in an online contest for young entrepreneurs. The prize was $25,000 worth of consulting services from the Business Development Bank of Canada. “BDC gave us our first 50K loan to build our lab,” Jenke said. “We have a lot of love for them. This comes as a big boost for our wholesale business model. We’re not a direct-to-consumer operation, so this will help our marketing as we expand beyond the 34 countries where Endeavor snowboards are currently sold through local retailers.”

      Jenke, who recalled that he learned to snowboard in the rain on a rope tow at Mount Seymour, has worked in the local snowboard-manufacturing scene for almost half his life. “I started doing top sheets [the outer layer] at Option [Snowboards] when I was 15. I’m now 34, with two kids, a five- and three-year-old, so this year we had to start making shorter boards.”

      As he said this, he showed off a pint-sized deck festooned with cartoonish artwork. “Throughout the industry this winter, everyone is spreading the message of attracting more youngsters into the sport. Maybe that’s why it’s 2013 but everyone’s hyped as if it was 1983 and designing retro powder surfers. There’s a new generation of kids who don’t know the rebellious subculture of being hated by skiers.”

      When it comes to his appraisal of design modifications since his early days, Jenke, who snowboarded professionally before starting Endeavor in 2002 with fellow rider and photographer Scott Serfas, said that, surprisingly, some things haven’t changed. “The geometry is very much the same—bases are bases, poplar-wood cores are poplar-wood cores—but there’s still lots of room for improvement, such as our new 3-D shape, which is a flat board versus the traditional camber style with a bent-up contact edge on the nose and tail for playful riding without worrying about catching an edge. It’s like power steering.”

      Jenke toured the Straight through Endeavor’s new research lab, a gleaming machine shop that adjoins the graphics room, whose walls are covered with a swelling collection of vintage snowboards as well as dozens of framed magazines for which Serfas took the cover shots. Jenke pointed out that this, dubbed the Archetype, is one of only three such workshops in North America, alongside Burton Snowboards’ Craig’s prototype facility in Vermont—named in honour of snowboard great Craig Kelly—and K2 Sports’ Ride facility in Washington state.

      “We can go from the design process to a finished board in a day,” he said while cradling a swallowtailed model that retails for $1,500. “It’s our Lamborghini, one of the dozen models we produce with a selection of 70 top sheets, all of which are sourced from artists around the world. In part, I wanted to start the company because I felt like I had an eye for what a great snowboard graphic would be like.”

      In an industry increasingly dominated by corporate ownership, Jenke expressed pride that there are still snowboarders at the helm of smaller brands like his. “Endeavor is all about being Canadian. There’s something about snowboarding in this country that’s a totally unique experience.”

      And one with ever-deepening roots.

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