SKIERS HIT THE HALFPIPE... And Launch A Revolution

With its roots in skateboarding, it’s not surprising that snowboarding’s popularity aligned with the creation of the terrain park. Early terrain parks mimicked features favoured by punk-rock-influenced skateboarders—most notably the vertiginous walls of the halfpipe. Terrain parks were not ski-friendly places in the least for the first decade or so of their development. Stoneham, Quebec, was a snowboarding hotbed, and its halfpipe scene was the site of numerous World Cup events. In the documentary, Becoming History: 20 Years of the New Canadian Air Force, JF Cusson said he “wanted to kick snowboarding’s ass.”

And with that, the New School movement was launched. Interestingly, the halfpipe invasion took off on Blackcomb Glacier’s Camp of Champions in the summer of 1997, as Quebec’s Three Phils, along with influential B.C. skiers like Mike Douglas and Shane Szocs, dazzled the baggy-ass-pants crowd with their off-axis and switch moves that were technically more challenging than anything snowboarders were doing.

Now, on any given day, skiers far outnumber snowboarders at the terrain park. And just to make you feel old, consider that the original Salomon Teneighty twintip was released 23 years ago!