As if BC didn’t have enough sick riding already, we’re blessed with a network of heavy-hitting bike parks to give us all the descending we can handle. For this film we’re lucky enough to have Bike Parks of BC supporting our cause, which means we get to hit the best bike parks in our province. Now one of the things that separates us from the animals is our ability to use tools. Some tools are for work, others are for are for fun. You could say bikes are tools to travel over terrain at high speeds, and chairlifts are tools for getting us on top of mountains. Put these tools together and you basically have the best thing life offers, unlimited descending. An all you can eat buffet of downhill euphoria. It’s almost too good to be true.
Right now we’re halfway through our tour of the parks, we hit Sun Peaks a couple weeks ago with Hunter and Vanderham for some high speed wide open ripping and we just finished shooting in Silver Star with Sorge, Gully, and Semenuk. Silver Star embodies the “all you can eat” mantra - there are so many perfect berms on that mountain… it is truly out of control.
Trying to capture a park with that much goodness on film is a huge challenge. What makes it so good is that it just keeps coming at you, there’s just so much of it. We couldn’t have done it without the help from Cam Sorensen and the Silver Star trail crew. We were blown away to hear that only 5 guys build and maintain the park. How they do it I don’t know but the fact that they’re on the hill everyday at 5:30 shows the level of dedication they put into their craft. We had to do their trails justice on film.
One of the techniques we’re using to try and capture the feeling you get when you’re there is through helmet cams and just watching the boys shred corner after corner. For this movie we purchased a Super 16mm POV camera. Our buddy Tim customized an old snowmobile helmet to mount the beast and tried to cut back on the weight as much as possible. The riders LOVE wearing this thing. One of the cool things of still shooting a bit of 16mm film is the excitement if getting shots back long after a shoot is done. As I’m writing this Darren is at the lab developing the shots and I’m on the ferry to meet up with the Claw, McCaul and the rest of the Anthill crew to hit up Mount Washington. Stoked to see what the Claw has cooking.