Jason Levinthal is the founder and mad scientist behind LINE skis. I had the privilege of skiing with him at Stowe. Before we met up, I put together fifteen questions and we got through about four of them. When J Lev speaks, you listen. What follows is Jason’s response to my first question; I passed him my iPhone and let him talk because what was flowing was essential for knowing your roots. I’ve transcribed the interview for the readers among us, but I’ve also included the raw audio for your listening pleasure.
Who and what influenced your skiing the most back in 1995 when you started Line?
Back in ’95 skiing, you gotta remember and it’s hard for people to realize, there were signs at the top of the Stratton Terrain Park, and most terrain parks, that said no skiers allowed. You know, that’s just a fact. And then, the other fact is it wasn’t even called terrain parks, it was called snowboard parks. If you can imagine that, then that’s only the tip of the iceberg of what skiing really was, and it’s such a short time ago, but it’s so easy to forget.
The only ski you could buy was like a 203 length, you know, if you’re 5’10”, 150 lbs, you’re gonna ride a 203 length ski that was like 65 in the waist, so stiff you couldn’t even flex it if you put it between two saw horses and jumped on it. It had no side cut, so you really weren’t even carving unless you were going 80mph down a downhill race course in the Olympics, which only 5 people can do. That’s what all the skis were built on. So, your options for skiing was basically this product that really inhibited you from progressing, and then you had no imagery other than Scott Schmidt and Glen Plake which, hats off to those guys for at least taking that product and pushing it as far as they possibly could. I mean, they’re throwing like 720’s off cornices and they’re doing like everything possible but it was still so far behind snowboarding, and snowboarding was behind skating, and you know, that’s ultimately what influenced me was the fact that all these other action sports existed and were so far ahead of the curve of skiing.
Skiing was one of the oldest of all those sports, and it was like the last one to ever evolve or change. I mean you’re talking 30-40yrs of just the same thing: skis built for world-cup downhill skiers, of which 99.9% of people that go to the mountain can’t ride like, don’t train enough to be able to bend a 200-length ski at an 80mph course of ice. They just wanna go have fun, and they’re really fighting the design of the ski. So, for me, design-minded, kinda inventor-minded, mechanically minded, I saw snowboarding, I skateboarded, I wakeboarded when that came about. I inline skated when that came about. Mountain biked. BMX. All these products were old products. I mean cycling evolved to BMX, evolved to mountain biking. Skateboards became twin tip. Wakeboards came from water skiing. Rollerblades came from roller skates. Snowboarding really came from a problem with skiing not being able to evolve.
So, what I did seeing that, it just bothered me for like a long time, probably, 10 years leading up to that. So, I started snowboarding in like ’88 or something. So that was when I was going to Stratton on the weekends and I was visiting the Burton factory, and I was seeing what Burton was doing for snowboarding. You know, from just an idea into a finished thing. So, I saw what Burton was doing with snowboarding and how they were doing it and then, eventually, when I had my second or third board, my first board was a Sims Switchblade, anyone that knows snowboarding knows how old that was. That was one of the first boards with edges, you know, a few years after edges were put on snowboards. Eventually, I got a Burton Air, it was a completely symmetrical board, or pretty damn close, it was the first board that was like that. I got on, took one run at Stratton, and it was like the light bulb went on: “I’m mounting my skis centered.”
So I didn’t mount my skis center, I was just on this snowboard, and I said, “this is crazy dude, like what I can do on this snowboard is unbelievable and this is what I need to be able to do on my skis.” And I was literally snowboarding half the day and skiing half the day. I’d bring a snowboard and skis to the mountain every time I went. Half the day I’d snowboard, then I’d jump on my skis the other half, because I love skiing because the forward facing, just like that was me; but snowboarding, I got a feeling from snowboarding carving, riding switch, doing tricks, the maneuverability, the playfulness, the fun, the agility, all is what I really also loved. I wanted to be able to do that on my skis, but couldn’t, so I just had to do both to satisfy my craving.
At one point I snowboarded half the day, I switched to my skis, I was on like 203 Rossi’s, those green ones, and then I, without thinking, just did a 180, cause like that’s what I had been doing all morning on my snowboard. This was like before college, I was in high school. Then like 5 years went by and I was in college and we had to do a project and I was like, “I’m gonna make a ski like a snowboard.” This was in ’95, so I took all the dimensions of a snowboard, cut in half—length, width, everything. That’s how I came to a skiboard. There was no more thought beyond than that.
So, I wasn’t about to take a ski and redesign it. I was going to take a snowboard, and evolve it into a ski, you know, start all the way from one extreme. That’s why it was short, that’s why it was wide, that’s why it was twin tip, symmetric, and had side cut, and it had a soft flex. All those aspects of that ski at that time, which people want to call a “skiboard”, was closer to the modern day ski that you’re on today. You’re riding on longer skiboards, or more realistically, back then, you’re riding on shorter skis that were fucking 10-15yrs ahead of their time. People call them skiboard for the same reason they call terrain parks snowboard parks. They couldn’t get over the fact that that could be a ski.
