No Business Like Snow Business

Half of first-time visitors to a ski resort in 1997 went to snowboard. About $65 million worth of boards were sold last year. Yup, that’s Jake Burton, one of the fathers of snowboarding, in those American Express ads. The sport’s mainstream status is ensured as the sport makes its Olympic medal debut in Nagano, Japan.

To Susanna Howe, snowboarding’s success is a “natural progression. There’s a lot of moaning about where the sport is going. But it’s the way of the world in a consumer-based society. If you feel strongly about it losing its soul, you need to know its history to keep what’s good about it alive.”

Howe, a 26-year-old New Yorker, wrote “(Sick) A Cultural History of Snowboarding,” just out from St. Martin’s Press. The book is the first comprehensive account of the sport, from its beginnings three decades ago, to the lifestyle, fashion and industry that have boomed with it. For instance, the first marketed board wasn’t invented by California’s surf culture, as widely assumed, but by a Michigan engineer who hoped his Snurfer would become “the Hula-Hoop of wintertime.”

Howe’s latest work--images of women she shot at the first all-female skateboard competition held last year in San Diego--was showcased at George’s gallery in Los Angeles last month.

So what is it about snowboarding?

“I’m not incredibly athletic,” Howe says. “I’m not outdoorsy. To be in a huge white-out snowstorm, where you can’t hear or see anything but snow, and you feel this weightlessness like you’re in space. It’s otherworldly to me--uh, not to sound like a hippie.”