Jake Burton Carpenter

Carpenter resided in Stowe, Vermont, with his wife, Donna.

On February 17, 1967, Carpenter's brother, Corporal George Carpenter died serving in Vietnam. Four years later, in 1971, Carpenter's mother Katherine died of leukemia leaving behind Carpenter, his father, and two sisters.

Carpenter met his future wife Donna Lynn Gaston, then a student at Barnard College, at a 1981 New Year's Eve party at the Mill Tavern in Londonderry, Vermont. She is the owner and chairwoman of the Burton snowboard company and, upon Burton's death in 2019, served for a year as CEO. Gaston was originally from New York City but traveled from New York to the house in Manchester, Vermont where Jake was making the prototypes of snowboards. The dining room was his store and the basement was where the boards got packed for shipping. On May 21, 1983, they married in Greenwich, Connecticut.

By 1985, Carpenter and his wife moved to Austria to create a European base, where his wife focused on the distribution arm.

About four years later, they had their first child in Rutland, Vermont. Their second son was born in Burlington and their third son was born in 1996.

In 2012, Carpenter became an inaugural inductee to the Vermont Sports Hall of Fame. Carpenter survived several health scares in his later years: knee injuries, testicular cancer, pulmonary embolism and notably, the Miller Fisher variant of Guillain–Barré syndrome, a rare and serious neurological disorder. Carpenter died November 20, 2019, in Burlington, Vermont, after announcing recurrence of his cancer to Burton staff earlier in the month.