Susie Tjossem will never forget the first, and last, time she stepped on a snowboard.
Jim J. Narcy
An original 1939 Sno-Surf rides the walls at the museum.
Jim J. Narcy
Trent Bush
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"Jake Burton came out, just before Vail decided to allow snowboarding, in 1987," says Tjossem, who was then the vice president of sports and recreation for Vail Resorts. Vail was one of the last ski areas in Colorado to allow snowboarding.
"He pulled up in his van with all these snowboards to have Vail Resorts people test as part of our decision-making process. They took us to the top of the lift, never having experienced snowboarding before, gave us a brief introduction and said 'Go for it,' as if it were the easiest thing in the world. Well, I body-slammed forward, backwards, forward, backwards, over and over again, the whole way down the slope.
"In the end, we all agreed it should be allowed at Vail," acknowledges Tjossem, who is now executive director of the Colorado Ski & Snowboard Museum and Hall of Fame. "By that point, we were already on the wrong side of history."
For the museum, that history dates back to 1976, when it opened in Vail, just as some of the earliest snowboarders were clamoring to be allowed on the slopes. Their homemade boards and makeshift bindings looked like death traps — and lawsuits — to ski-area operators and their insurance companies. But by 1977, Berthoud Pass Ski Area had snowboards dangling from its chairlift. Within a decade, nearly every ski area in Colorado had come around, and by 1998, snowboarding had become an Olympic sport.
It now accounts for 31 percent of all winter visits to ski areas, according to SnowSports Industries America, and each of the state's 25 ski areas now specifically caters to snowboarders with rentals, lessons and increasingly massive terrain parks. Even skiing itself has been influenced: Ski Halfpipe and Ski and Snowboard Slopestyle events will all make their Olympic debuts in 2014 at the Winter Games in Sochi, Russia.
But change came snowplow-slow at the museum — formerly known as the Colorado Ski Museum. When Tjossem came on board in 2007, her first order of business was adding the word "Snowboard" to the name. "I'm embarrassed to say that to this day, the sign on the building still says 'Ski Museum,'" she says.
In 2008, Tjossem recruited the first — and still the only — snowboarder to its board of directors: Trent Bush, co-owner of the Boulder-based companies Brandbase, Technine Snowboards and Nomis Design.
Bush and fellow boarders David Alden and Kurt Olesek had been working on an online version of the Snowboard Archive (Olesek is also working on a book on Colorado snowboard history) and dreaming of some day opening their own museum. When Bush approached Tjossem about collaborating on it, she decided to bring him on. Since then, the three men have had free rein to build and organize the Snowboard Archive.
"Before I came in, we did have boardmembers in their upper decades who would argue that snowboarding just doesn't have enough history to warrant a significant section in the museum, that it just wasn't old enough," Tjossem says.
The very idea of snowboard "history," with its lingering whiff of 1980s neon zinc sunscreen, still makes some skiers scoff.
But on December 8, Tjossem is hoping to close the book on the contentious battle between skiers and snowboarders with the opening of the Colorado Snowboard Archive, a major collection of snowboards, gear and memorabilia that tells the story of snowboarding's rise to popularity in Colorado and around the world. The collection is taking over a room previously devoted to the Hall of Fame exhibit, making it the third-largest exhibit in the building, after the museum's prize collection of World War II-era artifacts from the 10th Mountain Division and its extensive ski-history exhibit.
"It's been a slow climb toward this level of acceptance and inclusion of snowboarding," Tjossem concedes, "but we're trying our best."
The timing couldn't be better: On November 4, the museum met in Denver with the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame to discuss the creation of an International Center for Snowsports History and Art, a collaboration that could serve as a second outpost for both museums and would house the Mason Beekley Collection of skiing art and photography (now at the Mammoth Mountain Ski Museum in California). David Scott, chairman of the Colorado Ski and Snowboard Museum's board of directors, says the proposed site for the joint operation is in Denver's recently renovated McNichols Building — a site that the city has slated for cultural activities.
Despite her getting her ass handed to her by that snowboard in 1987, Tjossem has since become one of the sport's strongest advocates. "I never did have the nerve to try it again after that first day," she says. "I have nothing but respect and admiration for anybody who can make it down the mountain on a snowboard."
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Bush has been snowboarding since the mid-1980s and got his first job at the Wave Rave snowboard shop in Boulder when he was still in high school. In fact, he proudly proclaims that he's never worked outside of the snowboard industry.
Alden, a professional snowboarder who rode for the Burton Pro team from 1983 to 1990, is a snowboarding safety pioneer who also got his start in the 1980s, giving snowboarding lessons. His brother, Rick Alden, is the founder of Park City, Utah-based Skullcandy, which makes high-end headphones, MP3 players, watches and other accessories for outdoor-sports enthusiasts.
