3 decades of surfing Big Mountain

Stumptown Snowboards owner Joe Tabor proudly displays his first snowboard on the back wall of the store in downtown Whitefish. He handcrafted the solid-wood, arrowhead-shaped behemoth as a young boy in a school shop class in 1982. Stickers are plastered on the nose of the board where a rope is attached for steering — no bindings or boots required.

The homemade board is a reminder of where it all began for Tabor and the small crew of local snowboarding pioneers who first surfed the slopes on Big Mountain.

“They used to kick us off the mountain,” Tabor recalled with a smile. “We’d go up behind where the metal shop is now and ride down that hill.”

It wasn’t until Tabor was in college, the winter of 1988-89, that management at Big Mountain formally embraced snowboarding with lift-served access. Today, 30 years later, Tabor estimates nearly 35 to 40 percent of the people on the slopes at Whitefish Mountain Resort are strapped to a snowboard.

Snowboarding’s roots date back to the 1960s when the so-called father of snowboarding, Sherman Poppen of Muskegon, Michigan, first crafted the “Snurfer.” The toy he built for his daughters was simply two snow skis bolted together.

But his backyard pursuits caught the attention of the Brunswick Corporation, which licensed and manufactured the “Snurfer,” eventually selling more than a million across the nation.

Surfing snow morphed from a quirky activity into a legitimate sport when Vermont-based Burton Snowboards and California-based Sims Snowboards entered the market. The first National Snow Surfing Championships were held in Vermont in 1982, and the first world championship half-pipe contest organized by Sims took place a year later in California.

Yet, even with the sport’s surging popularity — it was featured in the 1985 James Bond movie “A View to Kill” — most ski areas across the U.S. banned snowboards until the late-1980s, including Big Mountain.

John McGinnis, 53, was an early advocate of the sport locally and helped open the first retail snowboard shop in the valley as a manager at Wheaton’s in Kalispell.

“I started introducing hundreds of people to [snowboarding],” he recalled of his time at Wheaton’s starting in 1981 and continuing to 1996.

“We were selling a lot of snowboards despite people having to travel a long way to use them,” McGinnis said.

In a 1984 interview with the Daily Inter Lake, McGinnis touted the growing popularity of “backwoods riding.” He said one popular place to snowboard at the time was a long run at Lost Johnny in the South Fork. The feeling of elation reminded him of “surfing a 6-mile wave,” he told the Inter Lake at the time.

McGinnis clearly remembers the long push to get lift access on Big Mountain — the last ski area in Montana to finally allow the sport.

“For six years straight I wrote letters to the board,” he recalled.

According to McGinnis, Big Mountain management at the time maintained the sport was too dangerous and too much of an insurance risk — a common gripe about the sport early on.

“I tried to call their bluff and arrange for snowboarding demonstrations [to show how the sport works.] From time to time there was a receptive ear.”

Eventually the resort relented, announcing in 1988 it would allow snowboards and monoskis.

According to a 1988 Whitefish Pilot article, then-general managers Steve Spencer and Norm Kurtz spent a year studying the sport, “reviewing, researching and comparing reports of accidents and injuries with other ski resorts.”

“We will continue to monitor their use and will be very cautious that they will have no negative effect on other skiers on the mountain,” Spencer was quoted in the article.

“When they finally relented, it was a big deal,” McGinnis recalled.

“It was an exciting time. Every snowboarder on the chair lift was an ambassador for the sport.”

Local talent quickly blossomed on Big Mountain following the resort’s approval of lift-served snowboarding.

Libby native Dave Redman was on the forefront of competitive snowboarding in 1989-90, traveling around the West to compete in slalom, moguls and half-pipe events despite never having been formally coached.

“There’s no pro riders or anyone I can get tips from here,” Redman said in a 1990 interview with the Daily Inter Lake. “But you improve on your own just riding — you learn something new every day.”

Snowboarders Steve Persons, Rob Berney, Tom Lyman and Manuel Mendoza were dominating the Big Mountain race scene by the mid 1990s and set their sights on the world stage.

Mendoza, now 45, recalls those four as a tight-knit crew of riders who pushed each other to progress the sport.

“That competition and riding together — that’s what we knew. It pushed us. We were always traveling to races together; they called us the ‘Montana boys.’”

Whitefish’s Mike Shaw led the way as coach.

“He was the guy who was really motivated to help us out,” Mendoza said. “We were pushing the envelope with training and using video.”

The ski resort also stepped up to accommodate the race team, holding an evening snowboard race series and even allowing snowboarders to train on the upper slopes in the spring after the resort closed.

“They got behind us and went all in,” Mendoza said.

Mendoza said it was Persons who was on the frontier of winning bigger events. A Whitefish native, Persons was named to the first-ever U.S. Snowboard Team and competed in races around the world on the World Cup circuit. Persons is the stepbrother to Olympic gold medal alpine skier Tommy Moe, who also grew up in Whitefish.

When snowboarding was recognized as an Olympic sport in 1994, the crew set its sights on the 1998 Winter Games in Nagano, Japan. Ultimately, it was Berney who got the closest to making the Olympic team. He just missed out as the fourth-ranked rider with three slots available. Mendoza wasn’t far off either, ranked in the top 10 nationally at the time.

Looking back, Mendoza says it’s astonishing that so many local riders were competing on the national stage at the same time.

“But for me, it was always all about the snowboarding and riding. A lot of it was for the fun of the sport and having fun with the boys.

“Those were good days. I look back on it with fondness.”

Another push of local talent wasn’t far behind. Freestyle and all-mountain snowboarders Jason Robinson and his late brother Aaron became nationally elite riders, while others like Leland McNamara, Dylan Parr and Canyon Florey — whose father Carlos owned one of the valley’s original snowboard shops — have left their marks in the snowboard film industry.

“Every few years, there’s a whole new generation of kids and the sport tends to reinvent itself,” Stumptown’s Joe Tabor said. “It’s great — it keeps it fresh and exciting.”

Whitefish Mountain Resort progressed with the snowboarding trends, as well. The snowboard race league eventually faded, but was replaced with an emphasis on slopestyle features and jumps. In 2005, the resort invested $250,000 to build a 450-foot-long superpipe. That experiment was scrapped after just three seasons, however, due to what resort officials described as a lack of use and high maintenance. Instead of the half pipe, the mountain turned its focus to expanding the Fishbowl terrain park and building a permanent boardercross course.

After 27 years in the snowboard business, Tabor has seen plenty of ups and downs in the sport — the slump around the recession comes to mind as a low point for the industry. But Tabor believes the future is bright for snowboarding as the sport continues to evolve.

“Snowboarding is going to continue to grow,” Tabor said. “And just like everything around here, it’s changing.”

“This wasn’t supposed to be a lifetime occupation,” Tabor chuckled about Stumptown Snowboards’ longevity. “I definitely saw the potential snowboarding had, but it’s not what I foresaw it becoming either.”

Managing Editor Matt Baldwin may be reached at 758-4436 or mbaldwin@dailyinterlake.com.