Photo: Connor Addis
I imagine most of us can relate to passing by a steep city street and having the thought, “I could…” There’s a difference though, between having the very brief, unserious thought that gets brushed aside in a moment, to actually entertaining that thought and thinking through the mechanics of pulling it off, and then having the stones to send it.
One particular street in Dunedin, New Zealand fits the bill. Baldwin Street is the steepest in the world, carrying a gradient just under 35 degrees, rising from 98 feet above sea level to 330 over a distance of about 1,000 feet. It’s steep enough that only one downhill skateboarder, Australian Zak Mills-Goodwin in 2022, has been officially documented bombing it. He reportedly reached “a very solid 50kph’’ and had enough fun in the process that he turned right around and did it again.
Mills-Goodwin has some company now on that short list of daredevils who’ve flown down Baldwin Street. This time the charger was a skier named Connor Addis who was inspired when he saw some dusting over the world-famous street. A short edit Addis posted on Instagram shows that he made it a true street session that day, bombing Baldwin and hitting a few rails in the area too.
Addis posted that short edit here.
View this post on Instagram
The footage probably doesn’t do this much justice, if we’re being honest. Baldwin Street doesn’t look like much in this particular video, but for a real-life comparison, that 34.8 degree slope makes for treacherous terrain on real ski slopes. According to Avalanche.org, “most slab avalanches initiate on slopes where the steepest slope angle is between 30° and 50° (about the steepness of a black or double black diamond run at a ski hill) and subsequently run into lower angled terrain.”
