A letter from Chuck, Founder of Tahoe Longboards

ORIGINAL PERFORMANCE SKATEBOARDS SINCE 1997

Before longboards hit the market, there were little options to take on big hills. Most boards on the market were made small and nimble to slash the park or take tight turns to get that surfy feeling. Sure we loved the feeling, but the roads in Tahoe were way too steep and chundery to bomb with a small board. And shit let's be honest, we are snowboarders at heart. We were looking for a different feeling than the rest. We needed something that could handle the local hills and the speed. And we were ready to put our bodies on the line to figure it out.


We were just a couple snowboarders with no skate parks and tons of hills in Tahoe. We decided to start making homemade longboards at our homes right here in Squaw Valley and Tahoe City. We spent months cutting out different shapes and going out every day and riding them. Some days were successful, some days weren't. I can remember riding down hills at 40 mph and having the board breaking under my feet. 


There was a lot of R&D and trying different shapes until we zeroed in on our first shape, which was to Talmont 52, named after the infamous Talmont hill on the west shore of Lake Tahoe. The next shapes we created were the Tallac 62 and the Tahoma 42. We had three shapes that completely ripped up the hills and felt like snowboarding in the summertime.

 We would cut all the boards out and sand them down in the party dungeon underneath my buddies house. After that, we would load all the boards in the back of my beat-up Toyota and take them to my house in Squaw Valley, where we would spend hours drinking beer and engraving emblems of Lake Tahoe on the boards. Then we would give them a classic Tahoe redwood stain, silkscreen the names on the back, and then finally clear-coat them.

Chuck Vogt Buckley ~ Founder

I’ll never forget after some encouragement from our friends. We made two dozen of them and hit the road to go to our first trade show. We walked into the Las Vegas SIA trade show and PEOPLE WERE STOKED! They had never seen any boards that long and loved the emblems of Lake Tahoe engraved on them. That stoke is what has kept Tahoe Longboards going since it's beginning in 1997 and keeps us going till this day!

Big shout to Aunt Carol helping make all this possible. We love U !

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