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MILLCREEK — If there was ever going to be a potato museum, it had to be in Idaho, of course.
A SPAM museum? It's in Minnesota next to the Hormel meat plant.
Las Vegas has its Neon Museum, and there's a UFO museum in Roswell, New Mexico.
So in a state known for its deep powder — "The Greatest Snow on Earth" — there just had to be a special museum involving the white stuff.
And there is one, but most Utahns have probably never heard of it.
It's mostly in Dennis Nazari's ceiling.
"What we have here is the world's largest known collection of vintage snowboards," Nazari said as he strolled under his impressive collection. "We have 1,084 boards on display here."
To see it, a snowboard enthusiast just has to walk into Nazari's Millcreek store and look up. His Salty Peaks snowboard shop, 3055 E. 3300 South, is the official home of the Utah Snowboard Museum. Nazari is the museum curator and the CEO of Salty Peaks.
"What you're seeing here are the early Burton snowboards, and they're all in chronological order," Nazari said as he began rattling off to a visitor a litany of the various brand names and specialized snowboard features in his collection.
A few are on the wall. Some are embedded in the floor. But most are hung up like ceiling tiles, two or three boards deep, with a few of their cousins — skateboards — mixed in as well.
In all, there are 272 skateboards and 812 snowboards going back about two-thirds of a century. There's a very crude one, apparently built in about 1950 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, decades before most people had ever heard of snowboarding.
Nazari said there are historical accounts of experimental snowboards going back even further, to the 1920s or earlier. But modern snowboarding didn't really get going strong until the 1980s when board sports rode a wave of popularity that started with surfing. Nazari took his first snowboard run in 1981.
"And the funny thing is, the first place I ever saw a snowboard was actually in a little quarter-page ad in Surfing magazine. My first day out on a board was kind of a trial and error," Nazari said, recalling how he thought there's "got to be a way to make this thing work."
Eventually his fun on the slopes and his business interests converged. The museum was a natural outgrowth.
"It is more or less a labor of love, I guess you could call it," Nazari said. "Our mission statement here is to document and preserve history."
If more than 1,000 historic boards seems like a lot, well, it is. But it's only about a fourth of Nazari's collection. He has several thousand boards squirreled away in a secret location.
A frequent museum visitor is Paul Price, a British transplant who became a snowboard instructor at Park City.
"Boards that I owned when I was a teenager are all right there on the ceiling, so it's amazing to see," Price said. "So whenever I have clients, people who come over, friends, I always bring them down to Salty Peaks to have a look at all the boards."
The historic boards at Salty Peaks, those higher than 8 feet above floor level, are not for sale. But that doesn't mean people haven't tried to buy the stuff in the ceiling, sometimes offering high prices.
According to Nazari, there's a worldwide market for historic boards — and it's even attracting crooks. The record sales price for a board is $30,100, he said.
"And I was the guy who called it out as a fake and still stand by that today," Nazari said.
Salty Peaks sales associate Jason Melville says it's not uncommon to see big groups of museum gawkers.
"You get the big 15-passenger vans of people from all over the world that have heard about this snowboard collection," Melville said. "You have people from all walks of life coming in here to see the history of it."
Nazari has dreams of someday putting together a bankroll to build a free-standing museum for his up-in-the-air collection.
"Well, yeah, we'd love to. We're just kind of waiting to win the lottery," Nazari said with a chuckle.
More information about the collection available online at utahsnowboardmuseum.com.
