Sixty years ago — long before snowboarding had entered the lexicon, much less the Olympics — Sherman Poppen had a goal: entertain his young daughters on Christmas Day. He went to his garage in Muskegon, Mich., placed two Kmart children’s skis side by side and nailed them together with wooden crossbars, then sent the girls to the backyard to play.
“I said, ‘My gosh, we’re surfing,’” Poppen recalled in a video. His wife, Nancy, combined the words “snow” and “surfer” to name the invention: the Snurfer. Poppen patented his “surf-type snow ski” and licensed it to Brunswick, which manufactured bowling equipment in Muskegon. Snurfers hit stores in 1966.
Five years later, more than 300,000 had sold.
Although people have been cobbling together contraptions to slide on snow for centuries, modern snowboarding traces its lineage directly to the Snurfer. Its colorful history, much of which happened in Vermont, is the subject of one of two new exhibitions at the Vermont Ski and Snowboard Museum in Stowe.
“Beginnings: Snurfing to Snowboarding” pairs perfectly with “From the Alps to Vermont: The Photography of Hubert Schriebl.” Stratton Mountain Resort’s photographer for 51 years, Schriebl, 89, of South Londonderry, has photographed four Olympics and documented mountain sports and culture around the world — including snowboarding’s early days.
Dave Schmidt, a museum board member who worked for Burton Snowboards from 1986 to 2003, curated both exhibits. To chronicle the evolution of snowboarding, he assembled Burton boards, Snurfers and other sliding devices as well as patents, photos, videos, firsthand accounts and memorabilia, much of it from the collection of Paul Graves, snowboarding’s first sponsored rider and a former Vermonter who worked to legitimize the sport.
Poppen owned a string of welding supply stores and saw his invention as a toy. Its rise to the global sports world was marked by fierce rivalry, wild revelry and repeated early rejections from ski resorts.
Shortly after Snurfers were introduced, people started racing — “as kids do when they have toys,” Schmidt said. The first organized contest, dubbed the World Snurfing Championships, was hosted by a Muskegon Community College fraternity in 1968 and drew 300 participants. “It was basically a keg party with people sliding down a hill,” Schmidt said.
In 1978, Snurfer’s manufacturer — then JEM Corporation — formed the National Snurfing Association and became the official sponsor of the National Snurfing Championships. A pivotal moment occurred in 1979, when Jake Burton Carpenter, who had started Burton Snowboards in Londonderry two years prior, showed up to compete with a board he had built. It had footstraps and a polyethylene base called P-Tex. He was denied entry because it wasn’t a Snurfer.
Graves, Snurfer’s sponsored rider, happened to be standing at the registration table at the time and argued for Carpenter’s admittance. Organizers relented and created an open category just for him.
Graves left JEM shortly after that, convinced that Snurfers should be modified and that a national championship at a ski area — as opposed to a party in the woods — was needed to grow the sport. But, he recalled in the short documentary “The Dawning,” “every direction we went, there was a ski mountain that wouldn’t let me get on their slopes with my snowboards.”
A 1982 letter from Stowe Mountain Resort’s parent company, displayed in the exhibit, summed up its stance: “We will not at this time or probably ever allow snowboarding on our slopes.”
But South Pomfret’s Suicide Six (now named Saskadena Six) welcomed the pioneering riders, and Graves held the first National Snow Surfing Championship there in 1982. Competitor David Kirk, who came from Saratoga, N.Y., snagged free overnight accommodations and slept on a pool table, submitted his recollections in writing: “The downhill course was dead straight and stupid fast … The ‘slalom’ was the same as the downhill, but it had 3 gates with zero offset. It was silly fast for my board without edges! … If you stayed on you did OK. many [sic] didn’t stay on obviously.”
After one year, Graves turned the event over to Carpenter, and it became the U.S. Open Snowboarding Championships, held in Stratton from 1985 to 2020.
While lots of snowboards popped into the marketplace — Winterstick, Trick Stick, Flite, Hooger Booger and Apocalypse Surf among them — Carpenter’s fiercest rival, on the hill and in business, was Tom Sims, a California skateboard manufacturer who sold his first Skiboard in 1976. Carpenter “was a very, very strong competitor, no matter what he was doing,” said curator Schmidt, who worked as Burton Snowboards’ vice president of global sales. “Tom Sims was exactly the same.”
Sims tended to beat Carpenter in races, Schmidt said, but Carpenter won in the marketplace. Burton has the largest market share in the snowboard industry today.
While Carpenter and Sims were competing in those early races, Schriebl was on the hill, photographing them. His image of the Burton team and a casual shot of riders are part of the snowboard history exhibit. “From the Alps to Vermont’’ showcases more of his work.
A native Austrian, Schriebl was a ski and mountain guide with the Austrian Alpine Club who, in the early 1960s, joined four of the club’s Alpine surveying expeditions to the Everest region of Nepal. On one of those trips, a cartographer fell ill, and Schriebl assumed his duties, which included photography. He has been making photographs ever since.
On Christmas Eve 1964, he arrived in Stratton, where fellow Austrian Emo Henrich had invited him to teach at Stratton Mountain Ski School. Schriebl took photos on the side. The resort included them in its marketing materials and, eventually, named him resort photographer.
Two months before arriving in Vermont, Schriebl was the lead guide and photographer on the first ascent of Manaslu II, a 23,000-foot peak in the Nepalese Himalayas. An image from that trip — four sherpas seated in a way that their collective shape mirrors the sharply pointed peak behind them — is one of the most arresting in the exhibit.
A 1958 black-and-white photo shows a single person silhouetted on Mont Blanc, gazing down on a sea of clouds. Another image, titled “Snowdrift,” depicts a wave of pristine, deep snow sweeping toward a clutch of heavily flocked evergreens atop Stratton Mountain.
Schriebl’s sports photography is equally awe-inspiring. He captured Austrian ski instructor Franz Ploberger, tongue in the corner of his mouth and snow flying at his feet, as he carved turns at Stratton in 1968. An unnamed ski jumper, eyes fixed, mouth ajar, knifes through the air, a red missile against a bluebird sky.
Other skiers pictured include Vermont’s own Billy Kidd, the Olympic medalist considered America’s greatest ski racer in the mid-’60s; Swedish Alpine racer Ingemar Stenmark at the 1978 World Cup in Stratton; and Austrian Leonhard Stock, an alternate on his country’s downhill team when he won Olympic gold at Lake Placid, N.Y., in 1980.
To get a shot of Stock’s winning run, Schriebl crawled through the woods to a steep pitch at the top of the Lake Placid course. He cut “an illegal hole” in the mesh along the run and stuck his 300-millimeter lens through it, he explains in text accompanying the photo. “I didn’t have much movement and was so close that each racer just filled this frame — this shot is uncropped,” he wrote.
Sports Illustrated published the photo.
“Beginnings: Snurfing to Snowboarding” and “From the Alps to Vermont: The Photography of Hubert Schriebl” are on display through October 17, 2026, at Vermont Ski and Snowboard Museum in Stowe. $5 suggested donation. vtssm.org
The original print version of this article was headlined “Wild Ride | New Stowe exhibitions highlight snowboarding’s history and Hubert Schriebl’s mountain sports photography”
This article appears in Dec 10-16 2025.
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