Zeb Powell taking “go big or go home” to a whole new level. Photo: YouTube//Screenshot
Humans always want to make things bigger. Bigger, farther, longer, more dangerous. It’s weird, right? Weird, but awesome. In the snowboarding world, bigger is better. Faster is better. Which is why Red Bull and Burton enlisted Charles Beckinsale, one of the world’s best snowboard park builders, to make a massive 100-foot jump at Mammoth Mountain for a film called Paved. But even Beckinsale was leery of the idea. Not leery enough to refuse, though. Because it was too awesome to say no to.
“Building a jump this big is always kind of a nerve-racking experience,” Beckinsale said. “At some point, it starts getting too big.”
It wasn’t easy to make. Some 1,500 blades full of snow were required, as well as a whole lot of muscle and time. Of course, it wasn’t hard to find snowboarders who wanted to hit it. Not just any old snowboarders would do, though, so Mark McMorris, Zeb Powell, Brock Crouch, and Kuba Hrones got the call, to name a few.
“We wanted to hit a pretty big jump,” said Crouch, “and now we’ve got a big jump.”
For many of them, it was the largest thing they’d ever hit. When you’re hitting something that big, you don’t just fly at it willy-nilly on the first try. You inspect it. You get as close to going off of it as you can without actually going off of it. Speed is a very important factor here — too slow and you’re knuckling it, too fast and you’re soaring past the transition — so figuring out just how quickly you want to be going is of paramount importance. Once that’s all done and the nerves are un-racked, though… the only thing to do is to go big. And they went BIG.
