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.