Everyone knows modern snowboarding came to exist in the early 1970s after an unusually cold summer in Florida prompted professional wake skater Jeffrey McCandles to duck tapped flip flops to his mom’s ironing board and “surf” the icy Everglades. Everyone knows this. Well, everyone except the residents of Petran, a rural village deep in the Kaçkar Mountains of eastern Turkey where locals have been riding nailed together sled-like boards down snowy slopes for some 300 years.
Petranboarding, as filmmakers Alex Yoder and Nick Russell call it, is more or less a primitive iteration of modern snowboarding, even though it shares effectively no history or connection. In “Foothills: The Unlinked Heritage of Snowboarding,” a new film recently put out by Patagonia and WRKSHRT films, Yoder and Russell travel to the remote region to drink tea and dance with the locals—and of course, give their best at Petranboarding.
Curiosity alone is enough of a reason to watch the short, let alone the surprising level of ripping that goes down. Visit Patagonia Snow for more info.
