MAXTRAX XTREME Olive Drab Recovery Boards

MAXTRAX XTREME is the recovery board for people who use boards hard and often: 88 replaceable hard-anodized alloy teeth set into reinforced engineering-grade nylon, so the bite into rock, ice and hardpack comes from metal rather than plastic. Olive Drab is the muted green of the range, quiet against brush and timber. Sold as a pair, made in Australia, lifetime warranty.

Olive Drab is the XTREME for green country. Against forest floor, wet timber and undergrowth it looks right in a way Desert Tan never does — tan is tuned to sand and reads dusty and washed out anywhere there are leaves. It is the natural pick for an earth-tone build. The shade has military origins. The cost is the one every muted color carries: buried in mud or snow, it is much harder to spot than a bright board. Clip leashes on before the recovery, not after.

What actually breaks one of these. We rarely see an XTREME come back, and the story is almost always the same: the board was bridging in very cold weather and took a hard impact. A board spanning a gap — across a hole, between rocks — carries the whole load in its middle, where cold makes the material least forgiving. Support it along its full length; dig rather than span. MAXTRAX has always honored the warranty. If your need for a board that will not break is mission-critical, this is it.

• The MKII is the honest recommendation for most people. XTREME earns its price on recovery work, driver training and racing. Get stuck a few times a year and the MKII is enough board.
• Alloy teeth cut both ways. They grip where plastic lugs skate, and they carry an increased risk of tire damage if you don't know what you're doing — feather the throttle, never spin a tire on them.
• Hard to find at 2am. Olive Drab will not throw a headlamp beam back the way Signature Orange does.
• Lifetime warranty, and we rarely see one come back. The failure we do see is bridging in very cold weather with a hard impact, and MAXTRAX has always taken care of it.

Mounting these? One Universal Mounting Pin now fits the whole MAXTRAX range, leaving two choices: thread length — 17 mm for bracket mounting, including every bracket we sell, or 40 mm through a camper panel — and capacity, a two-board pin for this pair alone or a four-board pin if you run two sets.

More recovery gear and traction board mounts.

Deciding between XTREME and MKII, or working out how to carry them? Those are the questions we get most. We were MAXTRAX’s original U.S. distributor and have stocked it since it first reached the United States, and the full range sits on our shelves in Prescott, Arizona rather than a drop-shipper’s — so we know what fits what, and we will say when the cheaper board is the right call.