Stay out of my line! (Part 1: The Rise and Fall of Snowboarding)

Where are all the Snowboarders?

For years, there have been many media outlets dedicated to the joys of skiing and snowboarding- Each dedicated to the pinnacle of performance in the sport; big mountain and extreme skiing and competitions, high performance racers, mogul skiing, pipe and park skiers and boarders, travel and industry, film and visual arts... anyway, you get the point.  Each glorifying some aspect of the excitement inherent in sliding down a mountainside at breakneck speeds. 

For years, alpine skiing was "the way"- the single most exciting way to get out on the snow and have fun as a family, an individual, or a team. 

Skiing always represented a bit of an attitude akin to thumbing one's nose at the expectations of a civilized world. 

Skiing was fun, skiing was sexy, skiing was Avant Garde. 

Furthermore, It was athletic, it was an outlet for artistic expression, it was freedom.  The Olympics embraced it.  People who never saw snow got to watch maniacs in skin tight clothes racing down icy slopes at blistering speeds in a display of organized confusion... 

But it was missing something. 

Skiing had become established; in other words, there was the inevitable skiing establishment. 

That anti-establishment, thumb your nose at the world attitude, was losing it's outlet.  Skiing became an assembly line of super-highway slopes, and regularly scheduled weekends that became formatted and "required"...

For single people, you HAD to rent a "share" in a big house for the season (which was a process unto itself; interviewing people to join your "house" community, reviewing resumes and income profiles to see if they "fit in"), you HAD to get a season pass, you HAD to have the latest and greatest gear, you HAD to fight traffic to arrive Friday night in time to hit the local bar scene, catch first chair on Saturday morning, ski beyond exhaustion, go to dinner Saturday night, get loaded, hook up with someone, then slide back out to the slopes mid-morning Sunday for an hour or two to work off the hangover, then drive home, stuck in traffic along the way.

Families did something similar; fight traffic to the mountain, have a late dinner before bed, drop the kids at lessons first thing Saturday morning, ski with friends until lunch, have a 3 beer lunch, then head back out to the hill for an hour before you had to pick up the kids from ski school. You followed that up by meeting other families for dinner and drinks (often rotating locations every weekend between family condos), then you got the kids to bed, all to be up in time Sunday for half-day, morning lesson drop off.  Then you met the kids at ski school after the morning session, tipped the instructor, then haphazardly organized your stuff, threw it in the massive, gas-guzzling SUV (hopefully not forgetting someone's game-boy or favorite stuffed animal), then hitting the road to sit in traffic on the way home, while the kids watched Cars or Madagascar for the 27th time on the back seat DVD player.

This was the definition of "the ski life".

Then, along came snowboarding.  No longer did it take years of lessons to learn to slide down a hill and have fun.  The learning curve was shorter, the clothes were cooler and more "urban", snowboarders did "tricks" and played in a half pipe rather than just skiing along and popping off 'loop-de-loos" or small home made kickers on regular trails. 

Snowboarding was fun... it was risky...  and it wasn't "established". 

Skiers poo-pooed it.

Your learned by having your friend teach you... 

Lessons didn't exist (until they did)...

You could sit down on a trail anytime you wanted to, smoke a bowl, and heckle skiers to your heart's content.

Snowboard shops distanced themselves from ski shops-

Snowboarders smoked a lot of pot and grew dreadlocks-

They wore urban clothes when not on the slopes and adapted a persona; they smelled bad, but they looked good... Even if they were terrible riders.

Until it became established.

The Olympics glorified it, everyone started doing it... they paid for lessons, they dropped their kids at snowboard school, they met for lunch... they sat in traffic, the look became fashion.

...and the ski industry was watching.

They were sent back to school by the snowboard industry, losing dollars every year as skier numbers stayed flat or declined, and overall lift ticket numbers plummeted (remember, you can hike up to a half pipe and, in most cases, buy a cheaper lift ticket (or none at all) to play in the pipe). 

-The half pipe was the skate park of the winter.

Then, that generation got older, stuck their skateboard in some closet, never to bee seen again.

They got tired of clipping and unclipping with every lift ride.  -Manufacturers couldn't master a reliable step in system that performed at a high level.

Falling hurt and the bruises took longer to heal. 

Snowboard gear became as expensive (if not more so) than ski gear. 

It became cliche'. 

This opened the proverbial door for a comeback.

First came twin-tip skis.

The first generation of them was not good- the industry had nothing to go on, but they took a shot.

They were easy to ski on; the centered mounting point made them easy to turn, and enlarged sweet spots made them easy to balance on while skiing, jumping, and while recovering on a landing, and they got popular, fast.

The next generation of twins was even better- but their design as a tool for the halfpipe and park limited them- they were still unstable at higher speeds, and they did not have good edge grip.  On days kids skied the mountain with the family, or the pipe was closed, they weren't much fun.

Then, came the "directional" twin tip.

Skis got wider. 

Rocker became a thing.

Extreme and big mountain skiers loved the extra width and the floaty tips and tails...

People were doing backflips off rocks on 40 degree pitches and landing 50 feet from the jump, stomping the landing, and creating fancier and more exciting tricks every day.

Warren Miller and Teton Gravity Research took a page out of Greg Stump's pioneering ski movies, and a new genre of skiing and ski film was born.

Social media caught on quickly-

...a new direction in skiing came to pass.

Skiing was exciting again.

Skiers were, once again, thumbing their noses at the establishment.

People were skiing out of bounds, more and more.

The backcountry industry was born.

People were learning to ski at a faster rate; gone were the hours of lessons required to have enough skill to handle advanced slopes.

The gear began to look cool.

Boots became more comfortable.

Technology improved at an exponential rate.

Skiers were skiing faster than ever before.

Ski manufacturers started sponsoring extreme skiers along with racers, and a new type of anti-hero was born.

Suddenly, skiing was fun again.

In a possibly coincidental, yet correlating, turn of events, the number of snowboarders began to decline. 

In 2016 The New York Times caught wind of it, and published a ground breaking article "Snowboarding, once a High-Flying  Sport, Crashes to Earth"

...and the ski industry was listening.

In November of 2023, SnowBrains published an article, "Analyzing Growth in the Number of Skier Visits in The United States Over the Last 44 Years" 

From 1985 to 2001 the level of skier visits remained fairly flat (accounting for some years having better snowfall, etc.), even given a strong US economy.

From 2012 - 2019, things started going downhill.  There were weak snow years, lift ticket prices climbed out of control- the industry started getting worried.   

The market was ripe for a Gordon Gekko turn of events. Ski areas were being gobbled up by multifarious corporate entities at a frightening rate.

Then, Covid hit in 2020 and people were working from home, staying out of bars and movie theaters, and looking for something to do. 

"It's ok to do things outside" the talking heads on the news told us...

So we did. 



Skier visits began to grow at a high rate-

People realized that the mega-pass wasn't such a bad thing; as long as they could come up with the money up front.

Lift lines were everywhere- they were long, to the point of being ridiculous. 

Photo Credit: Unofficial Networks

People were referencing the apocalypse. 

Yet, fewer and fewer of those people were snowboarders.

Photos of these ridiculous lift lines were everywhere on the web and social media. 

Yet, if you tried to pick out a snowboarder amongst the hordes, you were hard pressed to find one (I can only find one in the main photo to this post).

In 2021, the ANSI Blog (The American National Standards Institute administers and coordinates the US voluntary consensus standardization system. -It's a member organization to The ISO, who sets the standards for ski/boot/binding interfaces and binding release) posted an article "The Decline of Snowboarding",  (https://blog.ansi.org/decline-of-snowboarding-lower-participation/) citing some reasons businesses should be aware of this trend. 

For what was once a fast-growing industry, snowboarders are becoming harder and harder to find.

Long story short, the decline of snowboarding is very real.

All it takes is one heelside fall to bring on the concussion that makes you decide you've had enough of sitting on the cold ground to clip and unclip your bindings to get on and off the lift, or traverse a flat area, while watching people on two-planks fly by you, then see them skiing in bumps, trees, and steeper pitches with greater ease and less energy expenditure than you.

Don't get me wrong, they're still out there... mostly in the pipes and parks of your local resort.

You can, also, still hear them scraping the snow off of trails with perfectly good cover, all over New England.

But they are fewer and farther in-between

Yet, the antidisestablishmentarianism lives on.

What are your thoughts on the rise and fall of snowboarding?

*Main photo Mabey Ski