If you were the founder of the biggest snowboard brand in the world, how long would you wait before designing and building your own signature board? We don’t know about you, but we sure as hell wouldn’t go a whole 35-odd years before putting pen to paper and getting stuck in at the factory. How Jake Burton resisted the temptation all these years we’re not quite sure but he’s finally caved in and designed his own signature snowboard called the Stone Hut. Each board was handcrafted in Burton’s swanky new prototype facility Craig’s (named after the late, great Craig kelly) and only 100 of the things have been released to selected stores worldwide.
“Even though a piece of me has been in so many of our boards over the past 35 years, this is the first signature board I’ve built,” said Jake. “When the boards team approached me about doing a sig board, I jumped on it and talked them into doing a really limited production run so we could make them in Vermont at Craig’s. Up until now, we’ve only made prototypes or boards for team riders there. So the Stone Hut is special for many reasons, but the one I keep coming back to is I think Craig would be stoked that it was built in his facility – I know I am.”
Jake apparently spent a large part of the past summer tweaking the board at Craig’s, wanting to create a board that was built for ‘a powder day in the park’ – in other words, a deck versatile enough to handle icy groomers as well as waist deep pow stashes. The board has a twin-tip freestyle shape but a powder nose and a freestyle tail. The ‘Flat Top’ profile is flat between the feet for stability with an early rise nose and tail for added float in powder and the board is available in two lengths, a 150 and a 155, and can apparently be ridden around 5cm shorter than a normal board thanks to its nug technology.
The board also features rad Jimmy Hendrix artwork (from Valleys of Neptune) on the tail and each one has been personally signed by Jake himself. It also comes with a sweet little package consisting of a Valleys of Neptune laptop case containing EST cantbeds (size medium apparently – but you can get different sizes by calling Jake’s office directly by calling the number included), a sharpie for marking binding stances, an EST Tool for fine-tuning bindings, a credit card scraper that fits in a wallet, a code to download some of Jake’s favorite Hendrix songs and stickers from the Burton archives (apparently some of them are corkers). A pretty special little collection of stuff if you ask us – that phone number alone has got to be worth a lot right? Subvert in Manchester are the only store in the UK stocking these bad boys so get in there quick before they’re all gone!
When you think about it, it’s actually pretty rad that Jake has gone and got stuck in with the board manufacturing process – how many CEO’s of multinational companies can you think of that are still actually willing to get their hands dirty and put in the time at the fundamental levels of their company? Sure, there’s no way Jake actually built all of these himself, but having such a heavy input on the design, construction and graphics after such a long time in the snowboard industry must have been pretty exciting for him and makes for a pretty special product we reckon.
