As Zakk Griffin treks up a residential hill for a second, third and even hundredth time, the local longboarder has put his life on hold in order to slide and shred up to speeds of 80 to 90 km/h. All the while he stares death in the face as autumn’s brisk winds cut through his eyes while soaring down the pavement. Of course, Griffin dons the protective head and hand gear while he sails smoothly through a community that hasn’t had an issue with the rise of longboarders on its neighbourhood streets, but the possibility of serious injury and even death is apparent in the sport.

As a member of the local group of Orangeville longboarders, Griffin meets regularly throughout the county and province with friends and interested strangers who look to make the leap from shredding rails and half pipes to absorbing a different sensation atop a more elongated board. Aside from the varied style of riding, member Aaron Thomas said the community of longboarders differs greatly from that of skateboarding. “The skateboarding community is a lot more elitist, I find. When you go to the skate park and you’re not at the same skill level as everyone else, you’re kind of shunned away,” he said. “With longboarding, it doesn’t matter how long you’ve been on a board. You can go ride with a professional rider that gets paid to race, and he’ll take time out of his day to train you and keep you safe. We’re a lot more open and inviting to new people.” Currently, the group, which can be found on Facebook under Orangeville Longboarding, has 152 members. A number that doesn’t phase founder Kyle Hurst, who started the group more than a year ago. “I was only surprised by the first month,” Hurst said. “We had like 50 or 60 people get into it, just like that.” The group recalls when longboarding first struck a chord in Orangeville and how it wasn’t exactly well received by the public. Thomas shared stories of threats and altercations he couldn’t avoid in high school because his skateboard was longer than everyone else’s. “In high school, kids would try to fight me,” Thomas recalled. “We had people who would try to run us off the road.” Food and beverages were also a weapon of choice among some people, who didn’t think twice about hurling them at passing longboarders who cruised the open streets. “We used to go down the street and people would throw stuff at us,” member Mike Sampson said. “They were like, ‘What is that? That’s not a skateboard.’ We used to get people who would chase us in cars. “They’re afraid of what they don’t know.”

Now, the sport has taken off in the community. Moguls In Mocean on Broadway has been stocked with longboards and accessories for about five years, and as store staff memebr Christina Logan said, the sport has really started to gain popularity this year. “Longboarding’s growing as a sport,” she said. “It exploded this year. … We doubled our order this year and it still sold out.” While fairly new to the county, longboarding itself is anything but new. The sport can be dated back to the early years of skateboarding, when California surfers would pound the pavement looking for a place to ride when the waves weren’t crashing into the shore. Surfers replaced the salt water with asphalt and the white tipped waves for hills. Here in Dufferin County, hills are readily available. The group was formed by Hurst, who grew accustomed to skateboarding at a young age, but has since transitioned into longboarding.

Where skateboarding competitions see its athletes take to the skate park and compete for best trick, longboarders escape to valleys and paved slopes in high speed races, which has resulted in a death of someone close to the local group. “This is a sport where people have died,” Hurst said. “It’s a big ordeal to be safe.” With that, the group said safety is of the utmost importance. “There are some hills even around here that you can die on,” Thomas said. “You really have to respect the road you’re riding. A lot of the rules we follow when we go downhill are a lot of the laws bikers follow. “Stay in your own lane, use your hand signals, you always have your protective gear. When you ride at night, you have some sort of reflective gear so cars can see you — but as for speed limits,” he laughed. “I’m not going to say we follow those all the time.” Unlike skateboarding, the local pack of longboarders don’t have a sanctioned area where they can gather to compete, practice or simply go for a ride. They’ve had to scour the county for the perfect locations, all of which, they prefer to keep secret as the hidden gems of Dufferin County, but only for safety concerns.

If a longboarder new to the sport were to come across a hill more fitted for a seasoned pro and sustain an injury or worse, the repercussions would come back and hit the group. “We all like sharing the right information with the community,” Sampson said. “We like doing it the right away, as opposed to kids who do it the wrong way.” The group is more than open to taking new riders out and showing them the ropes. “We’ll teach them the proper way to fall,” Thomas said. “We’ll teach them proper breaking techniques, we’ll teach them how to spot corners, how to look for road conditions that they shouldn’t be riding on.” The sport has since grown outside the group of 150 members to inside the halls of Orangeville District Secondary School, where Hurst’s father, a teacher, has helped organize a student chapter of the group. So far, a handful of students have shown interest, where they plan to meet at lunch and after school to discuss long boarding before being introduced to the road.