Burton’s new Family Tree line is a free ride collection of boards influenced from various shapes dating back to the early days of snowboarding. Slight tweaks in the shape, from the tail shape to the tail length, have a huge impact on freeriding. It’s a unique and fun line that’s expected to continue to evolve in the coming years. Riders like Terje Haakenson and Jack Johnson have influenced the line’s direction and have played a big role of the final shape decisions. With an ever growing split boarding following across the globe, the demand is high for new shapes for making pow turns, dropping cliffs, traversing and making history. Join the Family Tree with Fish, Fishcuit and Juice Wagon.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lVfJ9jFIEE&feature=youtu.be
Burton Family Tree:
Scott – Terije and Burton’s R& D team has been hard at work on this new Family Tree line. It’s a free base collection of boards that represents a lineage of fresh lines. My favorite is this women’s specific split board, Antisocial. For more on the line, check out this video.
Terje – There are a lot of boards dating back, I mean all the way, to the beginnings of snowboarding/Burton that have influenced some of the boards you’re seeing – the Family Tree – this year. I mean we can trace all the way back to the Burton Back Hill. Those boards really kind of broke the crust if you will for what this free ride line has become for us.
Terje – The thing when you make all the different boards, like a big quiver – like the Family Tree as we call it now. You know, it’s kind of where you live or where you’re gonna ride is where that board will fit in and you know a lot of different shapes will work and be fun on that day or on that terrainJG – Burton has always had these powder boards and the boards rode OK, but I used to think, man I just want to ride something smaller. And it was like a big step for Burton and snowboarding and the industry in saying, “Ok, now you’re powder boards are going to be smaller.”
TK – Back in 2002 with the Fish, this was when we started building quiver boards. And basically JG, Jake grew up riding these early boards over here and these are the boards that have influenced the current line of Family Tree.
Scott – If you look back at some of the videos from Stephan from the past 2, 3, 4 years he’s riding the Fish a lot. We’ve been watching him and wondering why he’s on such a directional board for these big booters that he’s throwin double backs and 10’s on a Fish. It kind of struck us as odd.
Stephan – And then from there, they were like OK, we’re gonna do this new thing called the Family Tree. We’d like you to work on this one board. We already have a shape for it, so they sent me out a couple proto types. It ended being the Juice Wagon, we had a couple names for it. We could maybe spice it up a little bit with the tail and nose shape, you know how the old boards were with the pointy nose. They fit with the Family Tree. Even the graphics were inspired from those old Burton boards.
Maja – The Con Artist is a lightweight board. The first idea was to create a short board that could perform well in powder. It’s a fat board, but has great balance when I’m riding powder.
Scott – Terje for a while has been riding super high performance, very lightweight boards and being able to design a board for exactly what he does is not easy, but I think we really hit it with the Cheetah.
JG – Obviously, Terje is a big influence on the Family Tree and he wanted just a little bit longer board, a little bit more stable, a little bit more tail and that’s where his Cheetah five nine came from.
Terje – For this year’s Burton flick, I rode the Cheetah pretty much the whole time. It worked pretty well in the powder. It even had that little tail so I could still do some buttering. It’s a cruiser board. It has good speed and good for powder turns.
Jack Johnson – This is the Freebird. Just kind of your classic split board. I mean there are so many advantages to this thing, it’s like you’re kind of creepin, checking out your line, checking out the terrain you know zip over here, zip over there. It’s one multifunctional piece of equipment that allows you tons of access and tons of fun.
JG – The other option of splitting is the new Spliff, which is a directional Nug. We know it rides powder really well and do traversing and stuff is a lot easier to cross in front of your foot. That’s gonna change splitting for sure.
Scott – I think the possibilities are endless. The concept Family Tree line is that it opens up so many possibilities for shape. Slight changes in tail length, tail shape, pin shape, swallow shape – very slight changes in shape make a noticeable difference for riders. I’m really excited to see what we’re going to come up with in the next couple of years.
