Snowboarding’s Alternative Origin Story?

When you think of snowboarders, what image comes to mind?
Well, as it turns out, the snowboarding we enjoy during the Olympics or X Games is just one form of this sport.

Let’s start with a quick history lesson: In the 1960s, a man in the United States named Sherman Poppen took two of his daughter’s skis and fastened them together. Next thing he knew, he was attaching a guide rope to the front of the board to ease the steering down the snowy hills. He sold millions of these low-cost creations, called “Snurfers”, sparking the creative innovations that hurled a new generation of winter sports into existence. ¹

Source: Pixabay

That isn’t the only snowboard origin story out there though.

Here in Vermont (the home of the website you are on at Ever Widening Circles) we tend to think that snowboarding was invented by the founder of Burton Snowboards, Jake Burton Carpenter, in the 1970’s.

But hundreds of years prior to Poppen, a boy in the northeastern Turkish village of Petran, got bored while cleaning his father’s prayer mat. So, he decided to take it to the top of a hill and try sliding down on it. After feeling the thrill of gliding down the hillside on this newfound mode of transportation, the tradition of what is now known as Petranboarding was born.

On this Saturday Around the World on EWC, we follow two professional snowboarders, Alex Yoder and Nick Russell, into the village of Petran, Turkey, to discover more about the origins and practices of this mostly unknown, but very fun tradition.

This tradition may have slipped by you if this film was not created to capture it, so sit back and enjoy Foothills: The Unlinked Heritage of Snowboarding created by WRKSHRT and brought to us by Patagonia.

“The boy in the story didn’t create a tool to accomplish a task or goal; he took a thing he had to do and tried to have fun with it. It’s not surprising that it caught on. I like to think people just want to enjoy life, and those moments that put a sparkle in our eye are the moments we live for. These moments are our subconscious conduit, the way we interact with each other and nature that allow us to communicate without words.” ³

Maybe the really amazing discoveries in our world are just too good to miss, so someone brilliant will stumble upon them eventually and independently all over the world.

There’s something very hopeful in that concept!

Bottom line is that we’re all way more connected than you may initially believe. Wherever we go, we’re bound to run into someone that we already “know”, even if we’ve never actually met them. And through this sense of connection, we’re both preserving and expanding our individual cultures to share with a new generation.

Stay open to new possibilities!

– Sam