The year was 1988. I was graduating from HS and I owned a Sims Switchblade. The Burton boards of this time were not so great as far as I was concerned. The boards were super stiff, the bindings where horrible. The Cruzer was the same board as the Cruiser from the year before. Not sure why they changed the name but it didn’t matter it was still the worst board to ride, especially on flat runs because the concave base made it hard to track straight on those long slow cat tracks.
I do not have much more to say about this board. It was heavy, stiff and hard to ride. And this board was my first experience snowboarding the year before on the Cruiser 165 at Timberland Resort in West Virginia in near the Canaan Valley.
Burton however would figure it out with a little help from Craig Kelly. It wasn’t long after this board came out that Craig Kelly would start to ride for Burton and change the brand and snowboarding design forever. Long gone would be the flat square board represented here. In just a few short years Snowboarding will explode and with it Burton would become the largest most successful snowboard brand in the world.
