Mammoth Super Duper HP Photo courtesy of Mammoth Mountain

Since the early 1920’s, when bored children built makeshift snowboards out of pickle barrel staves and shooshed down lumps of snow on the backyard, the sport of snowboarding has come a long way. Nowadays, riders from around the world are constantly looking to go bigger, get higher, ride steeper and - in the end - push the sport to that new level of achievement. Indeed, we’ve come a long way since the inaugural rides on a pickle barrel stave.

A singular component of the snowboarding world that has evolved alongside the greater sport is the halfpipe. Inspired by skateboard halfpipes (which were inspired by the shape of ocean waves), snowboard halfpipes are now commonplace at most American ski resorts. Here at Mountainzone.com, we made it our duty to set out across the nation to take inventory of America’s best halfpipes and round up a handful under the category a Top Ten Best.

1) Mammoth Mountain, California

Mammoth Mountain, in central California, has a reputation for building things big. Take, for example, their acclaimed Superpipe. At 450 feet long with 15 foot walls and an 18 foot transition, this halfpipe alone would have qualified for top honors in the Top Ten Snowboard Halfpipes of America. But as their name seems to indicate, Mammoth wasn’t comfortable building a mere super halfpipe. So they enlisted terrain park designer Oren Tanzer to build the Super Duper Halfpipe.

The Super Duper Pipe logs in at a nifty 600 feet in length with 18 foot walls and 20 feet of transition. Add to the mix Mammoth’s off-the-scale yearly snowfall (400+ inches), a lengthy season (in ‘95 they stayed open until August 14) and the mountain’s notoriously early opening date (this year the Superpipe was the first halfpipe to open in North America for the fifth year running) and you have the top Superpipe venue in America.