Gliding is a magical feeling. It transcends all board sports, and even our forward facing friends would agree that the feeling is at the root of our passions. It is movement refined to be mostly weightless, and free from normal resistance. Gliding allows of us to traverse space with a fluidity that would otherwise be impossible. It inspires creativity, and creates a space for skill and personality to be developed.

When looking to the history of gliding we can easily trace skateboarding to our surfing friends in California, and surfing to ancient tribes in Peru. It isn’t until we try and unearth the origins of snowboarding that things begin to become contested. The modern snowboard can be attributed primarily to Burton, Sims, and Winterstick, (that debate is a bag of worms for another day) but snow sliding itself has never been definitively nailed down. Last February, Alex Yoder and Nick Russell set off on a trip with Patagonia to explore these very origins. Their exploration brought them to Turkey, a country that many would consider a curious snowboard destination. Especially when considering it in terms of snowboarding’s roots.

The journey began on a whim after Alex met a man named Ismael through Facebook and learned of a town called Petran, a small logging community located in the foothills of the Kaçkar Mountains. The people of Petran share various oral histories for the reason they started Petranboarding, but all agree that the act itself dates back over 300 years. While Petranboarding in practice remains an autonomous passion and may not have directly influenced snowboarding in the way that we would traditionally think, it represents a key point in snow sliding history. Ultimately, Yoder reminds us that it is not the board under the feet that defines what we do, but the shared passion for the glide that truly connects us all.

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