BELOW A photo from my current shop of a handful of old Snowtechs and Barfoots. Most of my good Snowtechs are in the Colorado Ski and Snowboard Museum in Vail, and these are some of the others. The third board from the left is the first snowboard with preprinted graphics. Up to this point everyone would sand and screen-print after the board was finished. I hated doing that, so we preprinted some ABS sheet, which we laminated with the other components in the press. We would have been better off if we didn’t use the pin lines, which made it harder to align correctly. Photo: Pascal Shirley Just as Ernie stripped off his jeans and T-shirt, he looked up to see the building’s superintendent, a grumpy fella with wiry whiskers, pull into the complex. The mustached man already had qualms about renting space to a group of what he saw as noisy, rambunctious board builders, and this incident certainly didn’t help their case. “He just lost his mind,” Ernie says. “We had to move soon after that.” This wasn’t the first time Ernie had made a hazardous mistake with-in a workshop, and it surely wouldn’t be the last. Now 52 years old, he says the majority of his most dangerous moments have come from constructing boards, not riding them. But making mistakes is crucial to the overall design process. “It’s like when you hear about somebody in a lab breaking some bea-kers and creating a new material,” Ernie says. “A lot of times, the things that work best come from mistakes that occurred during construction.” And Ernie’s been making functional mistakes for more than 40 years. From crafting some of the world’s earliest fiberglass snowboards to creating some of snowboarding’s first freestyle-oriented models, Er-nie has done more than just shape boards—through four decades of design, he has humbly helped shape snowboarding as we know it today. “A lot of times, the things that work best come from mistakes.” RIGHT TOP Durand Eastman Golf Course [in Rochester, NY] was our go-to snowboard spot in the early ‘80s. You had to hike in about a mile to one of the spots, but it was always pristine and untracked. We’d wear work boots with sandwich bags inside for waterproofing, and sometimes broke through semi-frozen creeks while traversing back there. This is me catching a little air in ‘83 or ‘84. Photo: DeLost Archives RIGHT BOTTOM My old halfpipe was eight feet wide with over two feet of vert. This was around 1981—I was still in high school. I built most of the ramp in my garage and broke a bunch of windows doing it, to the dismay of my father. Photos: DeLost Archives 040 THE SNOWBOARDER’S JOURNAL
The Snowboarder's Journal frequency 14.1: Page 40
