The Landscape Collection is a pinnacle range of freeride snowboards from K2 designed to enable riders to tackle any terrain the mountain has to offer with confidence. They are mindfully manufactured, precision-engineered, and built to enhance the rider’s end-to-end experience. All of the boards in the Landscape Collection have a sharp focus on specific riding styles and types of terrain and have been designed from a gender-neutral perspective. Your snowboard doesn’t know what gender you are, and it doesn’t matter. This is simply an assemblage of high-performing all-mountain snowboards for riders who want to rip the mountain their way.
The Alchemist features a stable and responsive directional camber profile with an early-rise rocker in the nose that eases turn initiation and floats through powder like a hot knife through butter. In its lane as the most premium directional freeride board on the market, the Alchemist is the go-to board of choice for classically trained freerider and longtime Mt. Bachelor local Curtis Ciszek. Curtis played a pivotal role in the board’s inception and through the entire product creation process, working hand-in-hand, turn-for-turn, with K2’s in-house design and development team.
“My riding is all-mountain and very powder-driven. Most of my winter is spent chasing storms and riding soft snow as much as possible. At home, I ride Mt. Bachelor a ton, which has really shaped my riding with lots of natural wind lips and jumps. We get a healthy snowpack every year, so there are quite a few powder days and lots of those natural all-mountain features. I spend 90% of my year on the Alchemist; that’s my board.”
Intimately involved from the board’s earliest stages, Curtis spoke on the close collaboration that brought forth the Alchemist, “It was awesome working with J. Stone [Justin Clark, K2 Snowboarding Development Engineer] because he’s a structural engineer, but he’s also an amazing snowboarder, which is really unique. It definitely made a difference along the way and in the end. He’d send me samples to test, and he’d be riding the same ones at the same time. We’d both ride them and then come together to talk about them—what we liked, what might need tweaking, and what could be better; and generally, we’d be feeling the same things. Working through that whole process with somebody who understands you as a snowboarder and also understands next-level board design is rare. Seeing and feeling the boards getting better until we landed on the final production model was a really cool experience.”
Freestyle phenom Sage Kotsenburg is a Winter Olympic Slopestyle gold medalist who has shifted his focus to the backcountry with sights on progression in powder, be that filming jaw-dropping clips or tackling new event challenges like the Natural Selection Tour going up against the best freeriders in the world in astonishing all-mountain environments. An elite athlete and a skilled rider pushing the limits of possibility, Sage chooses the Alchemist on the deepest days or when he’s riding highly technical terrain and precision is paramount, “The first time I stepped on the Alchemist, it felt like the equivalent of what putting a Ferrari on a race track must feel like [laughter]. It was the first time I hopped on a board, and straight away, it felt like it was meant to do a very specific thing very well. When I take that board out in the type of terrain that it’s meant for, like pillows, big mountain riding, or just a really deep pow day, it feels so good. It’s perfect in exactly the way that it's supposed to be. I’m setting up the Alchemist when I know I’m going to be staring down something that’s going to ask a bit more of me. I know it’s gonna handle, and it’s one thing I don’t have to worry about.”
Leading the technological charge at K2, the Alchemist leverages a number of developmental breakthroughs, one of those being SpaceGlass—a pre-cured fiberglass insert placed in the board’s tip and tail that reduces its overall weight and stabilizes the board when riding through the rough stuff. SpaceGlass also increases edge pressure, which results in a snappier pop and supports responsiveness and control when initiating, holding, and coming out of turns. Sage highlighted his experience riding the SpaceGlass-equipped Alchemist, “It reduces chatter when I’m bombing through bumpy chundery snow and helps me stay in control. If you like to haul ass, that’s a really good thing.” K2’s Justin Clark detailed the origin and inclusion of the out-of-this-world inserts, “SpaceGlass is made by the same company that manufactures carbon fiber for NASA. It’s a really cool material—super thin, super light, and extremely strong. When you’re riding fast through choppy snow, the chatter or the vibration starts in the nose of your board and then starts to reverberate into the sidewall and underneath your binding—that’s what’s going to cause your board to lose its edge and for you to lose control. SpaceGlass reduces that vibration and smoothens out the entire board so that you can hold a much better edge at a higher speed and through bumpier snow.” Curtis also added to the benefits of SpaceGlass and the overall smoother, more chatter-free riding experience that it delivers, “SpaceGlass has a really good and noticeable dampening effect when riding through the chop—it helps you stay on top of the board and helps keep the fillings in your teeth [laughter].”
The Alchemist’s uniquely textured SnoPhobic topsheet helps to shed snow like water off a duck’s back; as Justin put it, “We’re making lightweight, high-performing snowboards that are intended to be ridden in powder and softer snow conditions—you don’t want all that snow sticking to the board to anchor it down and make it heavy.” While it efficiently reduces unnecessary weight, the board’s high-tech top sheet also adds definitive durability; Clark expands on the bonus benefit, “With the SnoPhobic topsheet, your board isn’t going to get chipped nearly as easily. Say someone rides over your board in the lift line; it won’t take a chunk out of the side of the topsheet as easily. It sheds snow, keeping your board nice and light when riding powder, and it’s also going to be generally tougher and more durable.”
The Alchemist also includes K2’s unique Spectral Braid technology, which allows tip-to-tail stiffness to be fine-tuned independently from the torsional, side-to-side stiffness. This makes the board slightly stiffer in the tip and tail while keeping things more relaxed and manageable between the bindings which eases turn initiation—keeping you more stable and in control without compromising agility. Justin Clark dove deeper into the benefits of Spectral Braid and how the variable-angle fiber reinforcement comes to life, “We’re basically 3D printing the fiber into a pattern on the board, and we can change that pattern to be stiffer or softer torsionally anywhere on the board, and then stiffer or softer longitudinally anywhere. Typically, when brands are putting carbon into the board, it’s placed in a basic X-pattern, and that’s only going to increase the torsional stiffness right where you put it. By manipulating the angle of that fiber exactly how we want throughout the entire board, we can dial in the torsional and longitudinal flex precisely and fully independently of one another to create the exact ride we want. One of our goals at K2 is to be at the forefront, putting the best materials and technologies we possibly can into the boards—stuff that actually makes a difference in performance—not just something that sounds cool. Spectral Braid is a great example of that.”
Sage simplified the finer points of flex in the field, “When you air off something, you’re using the longitudinal tip-to-tail stiffness, but then when you’re weaving in and out of trees, you’re using the torsional flex, which you can feel more on your front foot, it feels a bit more free because of the torsional flex, and your back foot feels a little more locked in.” Both types of flex are essential, and they should be working together. Like Sage, up-and-coming Japanese ripper Aito Ito straps into the Alchemist when he’s pointing it down bigger terrain and through zones that require more technical acumen, “I like that the Alchemist is a stiff board, but it’s still easy to flex torsionally. This allows the board to handle any location and any situation. The rocker in the nose also helps quick turns and safer riding in powder. I would recommend this board for snowboarders who frequently ride steep slopes and large mountains dotted with rocks and other natural features.” The Alchemist’s Spectral Braid allows it to go big, ride fast, and take a nice straight line while remaining agile and responsive.
A specific and easily identifiable design feature found on the Alchemist and all K2 snowboards is the patented Hybritech construction. Hybritech features tried-and-true cap construction in the board’s tip and tail, which blends into a modern sidewall construction along the effective edge. Pairing the cap and sidewall constructions makes the board less torsionally stiff, resulting in better edge hold, lower swing weight, added durability, and an overall smoother ride. Additionally, with the cap construction technique in Hybritech, the board’s sustainable wood core can run up to the ends of the tip and tail, which are then capped. While many manufacturers use a tip fill—a large plastic square that fills up the nose and tail of the board under the topsheet, K2 can side-step that, bypassing the use of the plastic, another holistic benefit of the Hybritech approach. Ultimately, the result is a higher-performing board that is better riding, more durable, and more eco-friendly.
K2’s sustainably sourced, signature wood cores are another unifying design feature of the Landscape Collection. There are two cores, the A1 and the S1, with the same aesthetic design, with angled sections of wood underneath the inserts that go out to the edge. The idea is that whatever direction the woodring is going, you will get stiffness in that direction. The power-packed Alchemist features the S1 core, a mix of FSC-certified aspen, bamboo, and paulownia. Aspen and paulownia are selected for their exceptional strength-to-weight ratios, and bamboo is chosen due to their density and ability to absorb vibration, reducing chatter and smoothing out the ride. With this being a more aggressive, hard-charging board, it warrants as much vibration dampening as possible to stay under the rider’s control more easily.
The Alchemist also features K2’s Recess 3D technology, which removes excess material from low-stress zones in the board’s topsheet; this adds visual depth and shaves weight while increasing strength. Clark detailed, “Recess 3D reduces the board's overall swing weight, making it more maneuverable. It’s like when you take a floppy piece of paper and put a crease into it; it’s going to be more rigid; that’s essentially what we’re doing with the fiberglass. We’re taking unnecessary material out of the board where it’s not needed, making it lighter, and at the same time, we’re adding stiffness due to the geometry.” Stay awake in math class, kids.
The Alchemist’s Carbon Power Forks give the board extra backbone, a feeling of liveliness, and added pop and power. The Carbon Power Forks start right behind the back insert and run out to the rear contact points, stiffening the tail and adding response when and where you need it. The snowboard’s base is where the proverbial rubber meets the road, and as Sage noted when taking the board out for his initial test drive, the Alchemist is a freerider’s Ferrari. The individual particles that make up the Alchemist’s base material are first coated with a fluoro-free, all-natural, non-toxic, biodegradable wax blend by Wend Waxworks before being pressed together to create the finished wax-infused sintered 4001 base. Infusing the wax through the entire base creates a much stronger, smoother finish, which reduces the amount of friction against the surface of the snow, resulting in a faster and more durable base.
The Alchemist is a hard-charging, top-of-the-line, directional freeride board for advanced to expert-level snowboarders. In summary, Sage had this to say, “If you want to go big, go fast, land in deep snow, and navigate technical terrain, that’s your board. I vividly remember the first time I jumped off a cliff on it—big cliff, front three. I landed centered, where normally I’d want to be a bit more on the back foot, but I landed perfectly symmetrical, my weight distributed evenly from nose to tail, and the board allowed me to keep the nose up. Right then, I knew that board was meant to get air and land in deep snow, and it could go big. You don't have to be afraid of maxing that board out because I don’t think you can. The Alchemist is not a board meant for everyone, but that’s the beauty of this collection—there is a board for everyone.”
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