When snowboarding first showed up on the mountains of Vancouver’s North Shore, it looked pretty different from the sport we see today. In those days just finding equipment was a chore. Some folks just chose to make their own.

Another Excerpt from “Out West: Snowboarding, Westbeach and a new Canadian dream.” by Dano Pendygrasse.

By 1985 there were already groups of disconnected but dedicated snowboarders out in Vancouver who had been developing the sport independently of each other and riding the local mountains. Some of them, like John Kamitakahara, were frustrated by not being able to find snowboards anywhere, so they built their own. Like Ken Achenbach, Rudy Rasman was another early snowboarder who’d connected with Tom Sims and embraced the burgeoning sport. John tells me about the day he was introduced to Rudy: “I was driving across the second Narrows bridge in my Volkswagen with my homemade snowboard sticking out the back, and he pulls up next to me and starts screaming, ‘Pull over! Pull over!’ That’s how I met Rudy.” At that point riders were so few and far between that any snowboarder was a friend; they were such a rare breed that a sighting was reason enough for an impromptu traffic stop. “We were on our way to [Mount] Seymour,” John remembers, “and that was probably the first or second time I’d been on a board.” I asked John how he got excited enough about a sport he had never tried to build his own snowboard. By now the answer shouldn’t surprise you: “Action Now magazine. I stole them from the library and have still got the issues—I’ve got the diagrams of the Sims [snowboards] we copied to build our own board.” John went on to buy a Sims 1500FE from Rudy and later became one of the first people to shoot snowboarding photos in British Columbia.

Although Cypress Mountain turned a blind eye to the kids with the new toys hiking up the hill after hours, just down the road Mount Seymour was not so obliging and took an active role in dissuading snowboarders. There’s a semi-famous CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) news video from 1985 that exists online and occasionally makes the YouTube rounds, with outraged Mount Seymour employees ranting about the dangers of snowboarding while curious bystanders laugh and watch. It’s a stark contrast to the situation less than a decade later, when Mount Seymour embraced the still-young sport and became one of the favourite stomping grounds of the B.C. snowboard scene, appearing in several magazines and movies and birthing the famous Seymour Kids crew.

Images below – ACTION NOW MAGAZINE & SHREDDING CYPRESS circa 84.

Westbeach grew out of Canada’s fascination with California and everything it represented. If Chip had decided to sell shorts with an Eastern European theme we wouldn’t be talking today.

Here are some things from the archives. First is the article clipped out of the Calgary Herald from Chip’s personal stash from about 1983 or 84.

And finally an old sticker. The sticker is significant because it is a snapshot of the moment in time when Cal B.C. became Westbeach. It’s cool to see the single surfer logo that preceded the “three surfers” that everyone knows. Also, Westbeach was never really known for its involvement in skating despite having sold the product for yeras so it’s cool to see “Westbeach Skate Lounge”.

Finally, here is an excerpt from the book that talks about some of those times. Enjoy.

As the kids started to pick up on snowboarding, the retailers inevitably followed. Even if at first they were a little skeptical about the new sport. Scott Sibley remembers his first impressions of snowboarding:

“It was so good for us because all the young guys coming into the store going, ‘Oh, have you heard of snowboarding?’ you know bringing input to us and we’re going, ‘Oh really!’ There was a kid called Kelly Alm and he was just on us like crazy about this new thing called snowboarding and he brought this in it was the Burton with the medical hose bindings and all of this stuff and he goes, “Check this out!”  and you look at it and you go, ‘Are you serious?’  But, you know that was my first discussion about snowboarding.   And it comes through a kid.”

Of course once they started to carry boards, things really started to pick up steam. I asked Paul Culling about discovering snowboarding and the role that the shops played in the growing sport:

“I went to Cal BC which was a little pink house (on 4th Avenue in Vancouver), it was a Californian inspired clothing store, and then downstairs in the basement there was a skate shop and so we used to go over there and then it was probably just a matter of hearing that there was a shop in Vancouver that sold some kind of snowboard.  There was that, there was PD and…when you were a kid and you were skateboarding you would take the bus clear across to – I mean it – two hours to go to a skate shop, not even if you had any money, just to stare at the new decks on the wall, right.  And that’s the kind of feeling of this passion that you have and you want to go in and you want to talk to somebody else.  Back then if you were to see somebody else on a snowboard, anybody to do with snowboarding and you would immediately just talk because you want to share experiences.  ‘Where have you gone?  What have you done?  What are you riding?’  because it was all so new.  I mean everything was new.”

In 1987 Cal BC officially became the Westbeach Surf Company and the store moved out of the little pink house and into the spot that would become the center of the Westbeach brand for more than 20 years, at 1723 West 4th Ave.

- An exerpt from the upcoming “Out West:Snowboarding, Westbeach and a new Canadian Drea,” to be released fall 2009.