Screenshot: burgie8
Before Jake Carpenter Burton and Tom Sims, there was Vern Wicklund. Wicklund was a young man from Cloquet, Minnesota who along with relatives Gunnar and Harvey Burgeson crafted the first iteration of the snowboard. Here we see them riding their invention on a hill in the midwest; the silent footage is dated 1939.
The funny thing is that while Burton and Sims introduced modern snowboarding to the world, and are responsible for the pursuit’s immense popularity through the nineties and early 2000s, we seem to be reverting to this first iteration in recent years, a movement most notably led by Japanese legend Taro Tamai, old guard Jeremy Jones and Chris Christensen, and the youth in the way of Gray Thompson and company.
Yep, anyone who rides, bindings or no bindings, owes a lot to these pioneers.
