Pantheon: Gaia Longboard Deck

PANTHEON DESCRIPTION:
The Gaia is back! This is a new take on the Gaia deck, with a new construction and a simplified design. Historically, the Gaia has always been one of our favorite decks to make. The classic single kick downhill/freeride board is a classic for good reason. They’re versatile, practical, and fun. This season’s Gaia gets rid of the microdrops and turns the platform into a fully rockered design with flush mounts to compensate for the rocker to get your trucks back to flat. We look forward to standing directly on top of the trucks this year and having full freedom across the entire length of the deck. We increased the size and angle of the kicktail, and the overall concave continues to be a fairly mellow progressive radial with no flat portions anywhere across the deck. This deck is all about vibe, with an oversized cruiser type of feel that will have you slashing carves in the neighborhood streets and equally ready to point that sucker downhill and rip some slides. Expect to be able to do just about anything on this board!

The Summit Series construction on the new Gaia has this board lighter than ever, which really increases the playfulness and brings new elements to this deck for cruising and lower speed play that the older models just didn’t quite match. The Gaia is light enough to comfortably push around, kick into the air, and easily flick out low speed slides, and it is stiff enough to manage any hill you can send it down. The fiberglass and poplar construction is waterproof, stiff, lightweight, and it won’t warp over time like all-maple decks sometimes do, regardless of weather conditions.

Set up the Gaia with anything from 150mm to 180mm trucks. We have set ours up here with 165mm trucks and centerset slide wheels for a super carvy setup that gets the edge of the wheels right near the edge of the board. You can make this work satisfactorily with 150mm trucks as well, and 180mm trucks will be more of that classic longboard carve setup that pushes the wheels out a bit. We believe the kick angle is just about perfect with the outer wheelbase on the back truck, but when you put 75mm+ wheels on this board, you may want to bring the wheelbase in to the inner option to keep that kick readily available. Either setup feels great, but the kick on this board really shines, and you’ll likely want to optimize it to your needs.