Alta, Utah — In a vintage video brochure from Alta’s 50th anniversary, the narrator repeatedly proclaims that “Alta is for skiers.” However, that wasn’t always the case.
Earlier this year, the ACE Alta Community Enrichment Center held an event to detail the history of snowboarding at Alta. The roughly hour-long video dives into the years when snowboarding was allowed, why it was banned, how snowboarding evolved at existing resorts, the infamous lawsuit that aimed to get snowboarding unbanned at Alta, and the origin of the Alta Snowboard Team stickers and t-shirts.
Alta’s Snowboarding History
In short, Alta allowed snowboarding in the early 1980s. Because of insurance issues, snowboarders had to ride up the chairlift on skis, which was understandable given Alta’s steep ramps at the time. They could then take their board out to ride down. It’s a remarkable historical anecdote, given Alta’s now long-standing ban and the fact that most mountains had banned snowboarders around that time. Alta allowed them partially because the ski area hadn’t been discovered by the masses yet.
However, these early snowboards didn’t have edges, so they were only enjoyable on powder. This led them to go to out-of-bounds spots, including areas where skiing was banned regardless of the conditions (like the avalanche-prone Snake Pit). Only a few years after allowing them, Alta had banned snowboarders. While not the resort’s official reasoning, the traverses needed to access the terrain likely play a role in keeping the ban. If you do want to snowboard Alta, you can either cross over from Snowbird and go down (you can’t ride the lifts though), or take up your splitboard to earn your turns following the operating season.
Winterstick
Probably the most surprising takeaway was how snowboarding may have actually started. In 1972, two men came up with the idea of snow surfing and patented the design in 1974. In 1975, Dimitrije Milovich used an early model to snowboard down Mt. Baldy. Sims and Carpenter later created their own versions of the board, which performed better in various conditions. Winterstick focused on snow surfing, basically making it a powder board. There are disputes about how snowboarding started (Snufer probably has the strongest claim), so I’m not going to dive into the validity of Winterstick’s claim. It’s an interesting argument, though, about whether Alta ironically may have been the birthplace of snowboarding.
At this point, three ski resorts in the U.S. still ban snowboarding: Alta, Deer Valley, and Mad River Glen. At two of them (the ones not named Deer Valley), snowboarding history played a bigger role in their history than most think.
Image Credits: Mike Droubay (Greg Droubay), ACE Alta Community Enrichment, Alta Ski Area
