Echelon Snowboards

Echelon Snowboards is the product of a couple of defense industry engineers and a bunch of cool people. We decided to build weapons for the snow after we saw that James Bond flick where he totally rips through a bunch of ski-troops on the skid of an exploded snowmobile or something. After we developed high-orbit X-ray lasers and that thing that beams pictures into your head at night, we figured we could probably handle snowboards.

Since we have a certain affinity for the military, a lot of our stuff is directly influenced by it—either in the design or just in the details. We aren’t pro-war, because you’d need to be a big jerkface to be pro-war. We are however pro-cool, and let’s face it: lots of stuff the military has is pretty cool. As such, we are probably the only snowboard company in the world where one of the owners is a Black Hawk pilot.

We are rider owned and operated-but (unusually) this does not mean that we will flake on you mid-mission to go get the gnar on. What it does mean is that we ride what we sell, and we aren’t developing our products from an air-conditioned office on the beach. Our HQ is in Big Bear Lake, California—just a half mile from the base of two of SoCal’s finest and most progressive resorts. R&D means jumping in the humvee and 30 seconds later being on the lift.