Winterstick Snowboards opens R&D site near Sugarloaf
Courtesy / Winterstick and Kingspoke
Winterstick Snowboards, a Carrabassett Valley company, has opened its West Mountain R&D Lab at Sugarloaf.
Winterstick Snowboards, a Carrabassett Valley company, opened its West Mountain R&D Lab at Sugarloaf.
The company plans to do R&D, design and hand-craft retail and custom boards “tailored to meet respective mountain conditions and styles of today’s riders.”
Sugarloaf and Powder Mountain in Utah are now authorized dealers for the Maine-made Winterstick snowboards, the company said in a news release. The boards use locally sourced lumber for the wood core and sidewalls.
“The opening of the West Mountain R&D Lab returns Winterstick to its roots when Dimitrije Milovich first started designing and building his own boards in-house and established the original snowboarding company in 1972,” said Tom Fremont-Smith, president of Winterstick. “We have a tremendous worldwide and loyal following and the R&D Lab provides us with the unique capabilities to turn our riders’ dream boards into a reality.”
Winterstick was founded by Milovich, a Salt Lake City engineer who tested the company’s prototype boards at Powder Mountain, which was the first resort in Utah to open its lifts to snowboarding. Winterstick is led by Fremont-Smith, Tom Burt, Chris Lorenz, two-time Olympic gold medalist Seth Wescott and chief engineer Daniel LeRoy.
Snowboarding’s history is said by some to have its roots with the invention of the Snurfer in 1965. Winterstick claims to have the attained the first patent for a snowboard, for its Swallowtail, in 1972, and the company was founded in 1976 — a year before Jake Burton Carpenter started Burton Snowboards from his Vermont barn.
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