Snowboarding is an awesome winter sport, gaining popularity year-on-year. Snowboarding was originally inspired through sports like Skateboarding, Surfing, and Skiing. The first boards were first developed in the USA in the 1960’s.

Snowboarding became an Olympic sport in 1998. Attempts at snowboarding have been made since the 1920’s and probably earlier than that. People experimented with pieces of wood, clothes lines, and even horses reins.

In 1977, a Vermont native named Jake Burton Carpenter, created a company called Burton Snowboards. At first Snowboards didn’t sell very well as they were considered very expensive at $38 a pop. However Burton went on to be the biggest snowboard company in the business.

Back in 1982, the first ever National Snowboarding race was held near Woodstock, Vermont, at Suicide Six. The winner was a team rider for the Burton company, named Doug Bouton.

1983 saw the first World Championship Halfpipe competition, which was held in Soda Springs, California. The Halfpipe event was organised by the founder of Sims Snowboards; Tom Sims.

There are many styles in Snowboarding today, these include Jibbing. This style is influenced by skateboarding, where riders would ride on other surfaces such as wood logs, metal rails, park benches, and many other urban environments.

Freeriding is a combination of several types of boarding, like freestyle and alpine boarding. It’s riding the whole mountain, tackling whatever comes your way. Generally the board, bindings, and boots should be fairly stiff for freeriding as you will encounter many different types of terrain and snow.

Freestyle riding is all about jumps, rails, boxes and other usually man-made terrain. These can be seen in snowboard parks, you will usually find jumps made from compressing the snow with machinery. There are sometimes rails; these can be made from metal, wood or plastic. Boxes are also comely seen in parks, these can also be made from a variety of material.