Outlaw Revival

Riding and remembering the first snowboard park

- Joel Muzzey

Once the skate boarders took over snow boarding, things got better fast. Tricks, style, equipment—pretty much everything. And thanks to that influence, 1980s snowboarding quickly evolved from looking like some odd offshoot of windsurfing to something much better. The skate mindset brought other ideas. What if there were jumps and rails, banks and transitions? Terrain features built for the sole purpose of shredding. With the perfectly sculpted parks and pipes of today it’s hard to imagine snowboarding without them, but that time actually existed.

Until 1991 there was no such thing as a dedicated snowboard park. Not until a little resort in Southern California called Bear Mountain built one. Outlaw. The world’s first. In the spring of 2016, TransWorld and Bear teamed up to re-create the groundbreaking park, session it, and shed some light on a time and place in snowboard history that completely changed the paradigm. To prepare for the build, Bear’s park crew watched grainy videos, scoured old photos, and even talked to some salty old dudes who actually rode Outlaw. Then we invited a crew of riders for some laps down memory lane: local legend Chris Bradshaw, longtime Bear local Zak Hale, SoCal-bred Harrison Gordon, Bear edit regular Jordan Small, and a handful of others. Over the course of several days, the crew shredded the classic park run, lapping, laughing, and slashing the berms. Same as it ever was.