The Never-Ending Ride

The late Jake Burton Carpenter, an entrepreneurial disruptor who shepherded snowboarding into the mainstream, inspired countless riders to live life to the fullest. That legacy is honored in a new documentary, Dear Rider, and through recent interviews with The Red Bulletin.

Words BILL DONAHUE

Jake Burton Carpenter was the father of snowboarding, the mind behind the sport’s most celebrated brand and the man who first stood up for scraggly renegade boarders, demanding they be allowed access to the exclusive, manicured snows of the nation’s ski resorts. During the four decades Jake ran Burton, he spawned and evolved a rebel culture whose spirit—both raucous and human, both nature-loving and fearless— now permeates the entire action sports universe.

Burton died of cancer in 2019. This November, HBO Max, in association with Red Bull Media House, will release Dear Rider, an HBO Original Documentary that chronicles how Jake pioneered the sport. We interviewed some of the film’s key players, and they told us Jake’s life story in their own words.

Jake grew up in an upper-middle-class family on Long Island, the youngest of four children.

Timi Carpenter, 25, Jake’s youngest son; Creative Director, Mine77, a Burton brand Jake lost his older brother in Vietnam when he was 12, and George was a very proper dude. He was the co-captain of the football team at his boarding school, and the senior prefect and the class president. He went to Yale. He was a Marine. He was the good son in the family, and I think Jake’s dad was kind of taken aback by his death. It fucked up the family dynamic, so that Jake felt pretty alone. He started getting into trouble.

Donna Carpenter, 58, Jake’s widow; owner, Burton Snowboards It took him a very long time with me before he would talk about losing his brother. Or his mom. She passed away when he was 17. Those deaths were really painful for him. But I think they shaped him. They made him see how important it is to live in the moment, to have fun.

Timi Carpenter Jake was a little mischievous. He just wanted to have a good time.

Mark Heingartner, 58, two-time snowboarding world champion; early Burton employee Early on, he bought a Snurfer for 10 dollars, and he surfed the golf courses.

Donna Carpenter It became a theme in his life that he loved to dress in drag. He took any excuse—Halloween, a costume party. He would just go for it. When he was a little kid, his sisters would spend hours dressing him up, putting on makeup, wigs, dresses.

At Brooks School [in Massachusetts], where Jake was a boarding student, they had this tradition among the derelicts. It involved a secret set of keys that opened every lock in the school, including the one on the headmaster’s gun cabinet, and one year Jake was picked as the keeper of the keys. This was totally underground, but a janitor found the keys in Jake’s bag. The school called his father, and on the five-hour ride home, he said to Jake, “If you don’t get your shit together, the whole family’s going to have to move.” [His dad didn’t want Jake to go to the local public school.]

Timi Carpenter It was apparently a very quiet car ride. My dad was angry at the world and in this pit of despair. He told me that’s when he decided that whatever the fuck he was going to do in life, he was going to apply himself.

At his next boarding school–Marvelwood, in Connecticut—Jake became valedictorian. In college at New York University, he was the captain of the swim team. Then, upon graduation, he plied a conventional path and landed a job at an investment banking firm that, as he says in Dear Rider, “sold little companies to big companies.” He was bored, and in 1977, he remembered his Snurfing days and concocted what he once called a “get-rich-quick scheme.” He moved to Vermont and into a remote farmhouse, to launch Burton Snowboards.

Mark Heingartner The showroom was in the dining room, the basement was the shipping area, and the barn was where manufacturing happened. The barn was basically a wood shop, and every board was handcut and hand-sawed.

I started working for him when I was a punk kid in high school. It was just me and three other kids in the factory, and Jake was like an older brother to us. He was the grown-up in the room, and he took a lot of pride in the product from the get-go.

COURTESY OF BURTON AND DONNA CARPENTER

Donna Carpenter He worked 14 hours a day and survived on Slim Jims and black coffee. He was that focused on making snowboards. And this is a guy who started out with no technical skills. He failed shop class. He couldn’t fucking change a lightbulb.

When I first met him on New Year’s Eve in 1982, at a bar in Londonderry, Vermont, he was drinking Jack Daniel’s and milk. For a pre-ulcerous stomach, he said. He told me his name was Jake and that he made snowboards. I thought, “This business is going nowhere.”

But I started coming up on the weekends from New York, to help him. He was taking these prelaminated pieces of wood and dipping them into polyurethane and hanging them to dry. It was a very toxic process. We wore these respirators connected to a hole in the wall, and sometimes people would blow marijuana smoke into the hole, so I’d get high. Jake thought that was hilarious.

Mike Cox, 56, Burton Global Brand Ambassador He was a prankster. Once, when we were hiking up Mount Mansfield in Vermont, we came across this young couple. Jake asked them, “Do you want us to take your picture?” Then he had me take the camera, and he got up behind them and mooned me in their picture. They had no idea.

Mark Heingartner He had a way of making everything fun. Whenever it snowed, he gave us a few hours off to go ride.

Donna Carpenter But he was lonely up there in Vermont. He was busting his ass, trying to figure out how to launch the business and not run out of money. His friends in New York were looking at him, thinking, “What are you doing with your life?” And the ski areas were actively fighting him, trying to keep snowboarders off their mountains. They told him, “Oh, our insurance won’t cover it.” And at our first trade show–Ski Industries of America (SIA) in 1982—they literally sent union guys, the setup guys, to remove us. They told us, “You are not part of this industry.” I remember Jake getting into a tug of war over a board. And somehow, we stayed.

The first National Snowboarding Championships took place at a small Vermont ski area, Suicide Six, in 1982. A contingent of Michigan-based Snurfers came east to race and slept on Jake’s floor, and one daredevil hit 63 miles an hour, in basketball shoes. In 1985, with Jake as host and MC, the event moved to Stratton Mountain, a larger Vermont resort, and officially became the U.S. Open Snowboarding Championships. Burton employee Andy Coghlan won the slalom by .01 seconds.

Donna Carpenter There were women competing at the U.S. Open early on, and I remember asking him, “Hey, what are we going to do about the women and prize money?” He said, “Why wouldn’t we pay them the same?”

Kelly Clark, 38, Olympic gold medalist, halfpipe Burton did more for women’s snowboarding than probably any other company. They didn’t treat us less than the guys and they made a place for us. And I was a direct recipient of that kind of investment.

Mark Heingartner His goal was to grow the sport. We started going to ski areas, a few other Burton riders and I, and our job was to prove to the ski patrol and to the mountain management that snowboarding was safe, that we could make turns and stop on a dime, that it was compatible with skiing.

Mike Cox At sales meetings, Jake was really intimidating and super focused. At the very first meeting in 1990, he listened to us present products and then said, “These guys are supposed to be the best of the best?” I was like, “Ugh.” But when he spoke, it was really inspirational. He talked about what snowboarding meant to him, and about how we were a community. It felt like we were a family and the customers could become a part of it.

Donna Carpenter We hired a guy to work with the insurance companies and to iron out legalities with the ski areas. But we

were bringing to the mountain all these 15- and 16-year-old kids who didn’t know the protocol of ski areas. So for a while there, we focused on manners and etiquette in our communications to customers. We said, “Hey, you’ve got to follow the rules at ski areas.” But this was a demographic that was just going to say “Fuck you” anyway.

Mike Cox At the SIA trade shows in the ’90s, one company had a school bus as a booth, and there were Vegas strippers and showgirls in there. They had porn stars signing posters. The ski side of the arena was super boring, super stale. But on the snowboard side, there was buzz. Every night at 5, they’d start serving beer. Punk bands played live, and it was so loud you couldn’t do meetings—nobody could hear. I remember one day Jake and I just stood away from the Burton booth a little bit, and it looked like a beehive, with people coming and going, and we just looked at each other and nodded, thinking “Holy shit! It’s game on!”

By 1996, Jake and Donna were the parents of three young sons and also the lords of a multimillion-dollar business that was growing 25 to 30 percent every year. In 1998, snowboarding made its Olympic debut in Nagano, Japan. Four years later, when the Olympics were held in Park City, two Burton team riders scored gold. And in 2006, Burton rider Shaun White—the Flying Tomato, the most legendary snowboarder of all time—found himself on the cover of Rolling Stone, shirtless and draped in the American flag. Jake was now the paterfamilias of a global brand—and also the Pied Piper of an ever-growing band of outsiders.

Mike Cox Jake and Donna had this party every year, the Fall Bash, which started with 25 guests and has grown to 1,200 people. And everyone gets to walk through their house, their closets, their barn, their yard.

Kelly Clark He wasn’t afraid to have a good time—like having a fireworks show at his house in Vermont on a Tuesday.

Donna Carpenter What Jake tapped into—what he realized, starting snowboarding—is that humans need to play, even when they’re adults. Up until our kids were all 6 feet tall, we had a basketball hoop in our living room. And Jake and the boys would all play PIG to see who took out the garbage.

Timi Carpenter The ball was small, but it was a legit hoop with a metal rim 8 feet high, and you had to dribble—there was no traveling allowed. We would break so much shit—so many picture frames and lights. And Jake would just get them replaced. The games would get physical. At the Fall Bash one time, late night, Jake took a pretty hard foul from one of his buddies. He

went down face first and got two black eyes. And he had a TV interview the next day. He had to wear these big sunglasses to cover the bruises.

He was my Little League coach, and one day when it was pouring rain, he decided to teach us how to slide. So he just started running, full sprint, and then dove headfirst into home. Just ruined all his clothing. Then he was like, “That’s how you do it.”

On good snow days, my dad let us skip school and go riding. He was good. He was so quick through the trees, and when I was younger, he would hit the jumps and some little rails. Even into his mid-50s, he was still going for it, and my brothers and I still talk about the last time he ever hit a box jump. When you get on a box, you have to stay completely flat, but my dad got nervous, and he tried to turn off the box. And he fell hard. He hit his back on this piece of metal. And he was like, “That’s it. I’m done. I’m going to stick to the trees and the backcountry.”

The Long Fight: 2011-2019

In 2011, Jake sent his 800 employees a memo saying, “The bad news is that I have cancer. The good news is that it is as curable as it gets.” He underwent chemotherapy for seminoma, a form of testicular cancer, and was able to beat it. But then four years later, in 2015, he was diagnosed with Miller Fisher syndrome, a rare disease that temporarily paralyzes the nervous system.

Donna Carpenter The doctor told him, “If this is what we think it is, tomorrow you’re not going to be able to open your eyes, the next day you’re not going to be able to swallow, and the day after that you’re not going to be able to breathe.” Soon, the doctors told us, “We don’t know how long he’ll be paralyzed. We don’t know if we can stop the paralysis.”

Timi Carpenter He was the most active person I ever met. And all of a sudden, he was in a hospital bed, locked in his body.

Donna Carpenter By the third week, he was distraught. You could see it, watching his heart monitor. His pulse went from like 52 to 160. He never lost the ability to move his hands, though. He could write, even if he couldn’t see, and one night, when our sons were visiting, he wrote, “I want to commit suicide.”

Then, the next morning, I’ll never forget it, I walked in and he’d written this long note saying, “I realize I have no control over this. I surrender.” And when the nurses took him outside and sat him in front of the mountains (we were in New Hampshire), he wrote, “I want to live now.”

We got to the rehab a couple of days before his birthday, and he said to me—he was on a ventilator; he was doing this by writing—“I want to give every patient and doctor a cupcake.” So I had this friend of mine order 300 cupcakes.

Timi Carpenter Once he got back on his feet, he was just off to the races. He started riding a hundred days a year again. We went to snowboard events in Europe and hung out with the riders all night. For my 21st birthday in 2017, he took me to Burning Man. And I remember him dancing at this party and schmoozing this crowd. This girl I was talking with was like, “Wow, that dude’s super fun and rad.” And I was like, “Yeah, that’s my dad.”

Donna Carpenter When he was 63, he said, “I think my best friend right now is Mark McMorris.” And he was a 20-something pro snowboarder from Saskatchewan, Canada. inspiring to me, and a good friend. In 2017, when I hit a tree at Whistler and got hospitalized, he flew to visit me, the founder of the biggest snowboard brand in the world. I don’t think that would have happened at any other company of that scale. We just kicked it. He brought me food. We hung out.

All over the world, Jake and I would check out clothes and different products for inspiration. No one cared more about product than that guy. He obsessed over the most minuscule details. He could talk about a backpack strap for an hour and a half—where it was snagging, whatever. He looked to me for what was cool and what was next. For a while, he would only listen to hip-hop because we listened to hip-hop.

Timi Carpenter I was worried about Jake. I told him, “Hey, man, you were just laid up for a long time. You probably need to ease back into life and take better care of yourself.” But he was kind of having none of it. He said, “I’m on my victory lap.”

Then one day he called me, and there was just something in his voice. I could tell right away. “The cancer came back,” he said, “but I’m doing everything I can to fight it.” He told me, “I’ve beaten it before. I’ll beat it again.” But he sounded flat and defeated.

Donna Carpenter I think that if Miller Fisher hadn’t happened, he could have fought the cancer a second time. But now I think he just knew in his heart that he had fought all he could. He saw what chemotherapy does to you. And he didn’t want to waste away and die like that. And he didn’t really have his sense of humor anymore— that’s how I knew.

The Never-Ending Ride

Jake Burton passed away on November 20, 2019. And he said, “I realize that Jake didn’t just bring us snowboarding. He opened up his lifestyle to all of us, and then we all looked at it and said, ‘Yeah, I want to live like that, too.’”

Donna Carpenter If people want to honor his legacy, they should get out there and ride. Snowboarding is the best way to get in the moment and to be one with nature. Stay a community. Have each other’s backs.

Kelly Clark He always put snowboarding first, and he listened to the riders. I think he’d be proud if we could continue that legacy.

Mark McMorris We just gotta keep it core. Enjoy the mountains with your friends, push the boundaries. Don’t be the skier on the hill. Stay rebellious. Standing sideways is the dopest thing ever.

Learn more about Jake Burton Carpenter in the HBO Original documentary Dear Rider, now streaming on HBO Max.