Photo: Elevated Surfcraft
Aaron Lebowitz makes snowboards shaped for surfers. His brand, Elevated Surfcraft, features a whole quiver of shapes that mimic what you’re more likely to find hanging on the walls of a shop in San Clemente than a shop in Mammoth. He isn’t the only board maker with this approach and he’s not the first, but his enthusiasm for it all is definitely one of a kind.
The first time I met Aaron was on an invitation to check out a frozen wave park just an hour outside of Los Angeles. He handed me a board and instantly started talking me through the art of surfing on snow. We looked at the thing together like it was a brand new mid-length in one of those San Clemente surf shops — not much rocker, nothing you’re going to throw around like a skateboard, but definitely something that invites you to draw some big lines with a bigger smile across your face.
This routine is common with surfboards but not so much with snowboards, I guess. At least not the way Aaron explains it. He has serious grom-like energy for making turns, going fast — surfboards, snowboards, and skateboards — that’s infectious. And picking his brain about how he started this whole endeavor of making snowboards shaped for surfers is like getting a private Ted Talk from Jake Burton and Ben Aipa at once.
I still ride the board. It makes me want to surf as much as it makes me want to ride snow, which I guess is the whole point, isn’t it?
The first time we met you walked me through something that caught my attention: you look at a surfboard and then your mind goes to ‘how does that translate to a snowboard?’ As a surfer, I’ look at every surfboard and instantly mind-surf it, sizing it up, checking all the different unique things that separate it from any other board. I know what those turns are going to feel like just looking at it. That’s not really as prominent snowboard to snowboard…
I think we’re reshaping that narrative now. It’s been like this for maybe 30 years for snowboarding: you’re on a plank, you’re sliding down a hill on snow. It should be able to get you around the whole mountain, you should be able to go fast, jump off stuff, you know. Then you had the X Games, you had the Olympics, and those kind of pushed snowboarding into what’s more or less become skateboarding…on snow. And so all the shapes are designed off of that basis.
But if that’s not the primary basis for snowboarding then the designs should be alternative. It was just a freestyle-skate modality and the board got shaped so much to just that. Sure, there were variances, rockers or cambers, this and that. But it very much became standardized.
Kind of this one size fits all approach to shaping boards?
Yeah, but the the cohort before us, the guys in the 70s and the 80s, they were under a whole different modality, right? They were surfing. The whole idea was surfing on snow, right? Surfing and riding powder, especially because they weren’t even allowed on the resorts. So the board shapes that came from that era, they were really based off of that concept — float, turn, flow.
But we have pretty much come up in that late 90s, early 2000s freestyle movement. Sure, once you’re an advanced rider you’re starting to get a little more fine tuned to what board works for you. And it’s even determined by location, right? If you’re a Pacific Northwest rider you’ll ride this, if you’re a Rocky Mountains rider you’ll ride that, and we see how we can design boards more like a surfboard shaper making boards for a certain wave. You know a single fin rides like this, a quad rides like that. They have different approaches. They fit better with different waves.There’s a whole variety there.
So, I’m curious where you had this “a-ha” moment and wanted to incorporate all this knowledge of both, the history and the shaping of boards, into what you were building as a snowboard brand.
I’d just stop in Oregon, meet a friend who was a shaper, and we’d shape a board. He’d tell me everything he knew about that board (shape) and style, and then I’d go out and surf it all summer long, really tune into that style, understand the dynamics of it. And then I’d draw out a (snowboard) design. At a certain point, I stopped making the boards by hand, and I was sending out the designs to the factory. And so I would wait a couple months while I kept surfing that board, and then when winter would come, I’d go back to the mountains.
The snowboard would arrive. I would then get on that board, and because I had been surfing in that modality and that style all summer long and understood the dynamics of why and how that board works, how it does, even if I wasn’t like, that great of a surfer on it, I already had the feel of it ingrained. I would get on the snow and I would just apply that same modality to the snowboard. I had been riding these same shoulder-high waves all summer long, for example, so when I got to the snow that’s all I saw or what I was drawn to. I would say, like, 85 percent of the time it (the board design) actually worked (to mimic a similar feel on a surfboard). For the most part, it pretty much would perform as designed, as interpreted from the design that had been studied and perfected in the surfboard.
Photo: Elevated Surfcraft
That’s a pretty good hit rate.
The snowboarders who have never surfed, they don’t understand the concept of being in the pocket, of setting that bottom turn, tucking back up under the lip, or where to lay that cut back, or how much speed you need. But surfers really find the translation very easy. They just had to get out of the mindset of snowboarding. Oh, I’m doing the same thing as surfing. Your stance is set up, your movement, your pressure is set up. All these things, like you have muscle memory.
I’m curious if there’s one board that you look at in your snowboard lineup, and you’re like, “I nailed it.”
Most of the shapes have gone through like a three-iteration process. Some of that has to do with template. You know, maybe the the contact points, the wide points are up a little or back a little. Does that really have that glide feel? Does that have that hold feel? Is this the right flex pattern?
But to answer your question, once I started to understand the mathematics, the engineering, and not just the aesthetic, then it was kind of like playing with a chassis. Once I started locking in the Elevated line versus the general, weird shaping that I was doing for the first couple years, and I focused on this surf layout, most of them hit.
I think the Salmon was really the one that I was like, “I don’t think that’s right.” We’d gone back and forth on it like seven times. I rode it a couple times. I looked at it on the wall for like two years and was like, “It’s just not right and I need to modify it by just a couple centimeters.”
I eventually went out to everybody who had that board and was like “Guys, I’m sorry, that wasn’t the intended experience. I know you thought it was great, but here, bring that back to me, and let me give you the new one, because this is what was actually intended.”
So you did a recall basically on a specific shape because you felt like you never nailed what you were intending?
Yeah. This was a very special and unique board. This was a board for the guys who are 6’5″, you know, 300 pounds, size 13 or 14, boots. They’ve always just been fucked over by the standardization of boards for a 5’10”, size 10 rider. They’ve never had something that actually worked for them. They never got the experience of being able to turn the board on rail without dragging their toes. So they’re looking at all of us ripping these turns and just bumming that it’s not even available to them. So it was like a two-year process that I worked with all these guys to create this shape for them. They were stoked because they’d never had anything that worked even close to that.
It’s funny the way you explain that. People who are just in general, artists, when we have this kind of artistic inspiration, it’s like an itch. There are times when you make something — music, writing, painting, surfboards — but it doesn’t scratch that itch. Somebody else may love it but the artist just goes mad.
And if it doesn’t work is it really that important? But if it does scratch the itch, how satisfying is that? There was a fulfillment that you were reaching for, and you’re still searching for it.
