MOUNTAIN LIFE - Coast Mountains | Fall Winter 2019

I t sounds laughable now, but at the time it was big news—a world event with the potential to drastically affect every aspect of human civilization. Newscasts spent hours dragging expert after expert in to dissect every angle and debate every possibility. It even had a sinister-yet-futuristic name: Y2K. It was all bullshit of course. Little (if anything) happened when the clocks rolled over at 12:01am on January 1, 2000. Traffic lights stayed on, bank accounts were secure, dentist appointments remained on the digital books, and everyone who had feared the worst when all the computers in the world rolled their date logs from to 99 to 00 woke up a little disappointed. Nothing had happened. Or so it seemed. In fact, the new millennium would soon usher in a technology that would indeed drastically affect human civilization—social media was looming on the horizon, ready to wrap its tendrils of connectivity around anyone with a modem and some time to kill. And here in the mountains, our first taste of it came via snowboard.com. Owned by Whistler snowboarder Rick Godwin, snowboard.com was an online community of snowboarders who could create profiles, instant message chat with each other, upload pics and videos of riding, meet “friends,” set up dates, arrange rides, find places to stay and keep in touch with others stoked to shred. No skiers allowed. “I wanted to create a cool place for snowboarders to go and get psyched about snowboarding,” Godwin told Whistler’s Pique Newsmagazine in an April 2001 story. “There are not a lot of places out there to meet up with other members of the snowboard community—most of the sites are either stores or news sites, while this is based on the riders themselves. There isn’t another site out there like it.” At the time, snowboarding was the hottest winter sport on the planet (and had just been “allowed” in the 1998 Winter Olympics) but for core riders, the years of discrimination and ridicule by the ski industry were still fresh in their minds. Having their own place to go and get psyched was a welcome concept. Snowboard.com launched in November 2000 (over three years before Facebook launched to Harvard students). Within five months it had 80,000 members. Two years later, that number was north of half a million, then a million. And then, almost overnight, the bubble burst. Mountain Life tracked down some of the site’s creators and biggest fans to find out what happened. Long before Facebook, MySpace or Tinder, snowboarders around the globe were uploading profile pics, talking trash, and hooking up on their very own social network. HISTORY 39