Aspen – The hardest thing for Idaho’s Heath Frisby was answering the question that kept slipping into his Red Bull-helmeted head as he noisily thumbed his 500-pound snowmobile toward a metal ramp pointing to the sky.
“Mentally, it’s really challenging,” the freestyle snowmobile icon said of the laid-out backflip he learned several years ago and flashed for awestruck crowds at Sunday’s X Games. “You just have to (ask) that big question: ‘Should I really be doing this?”‘
The answer, it seems, is a resounding yes.
With every brazen backflip on the first freestyle snowmobile course, the X Games chasm separating the mountain-loving sliders and the throttle-thumbed snowmobiling flatlanders shrank.
The culture clash of Winter X is evidenced every year when thousands of Midwestern snowmobile racers and fans gather on one side of the Buttermilk ski area venue and thousands more mountain-oriented snowsports athletes and fans gather on the other side. One side has a track, the other a pipe. They rarely intermingle.
Until this year, when freestyle snowmobilers gathered for the first time in Winter X’s 11 years to showcase their unique and nascent brand of slednecking. They don’t race in weaving circles 12 at a time. They flip and spin over the course, spending most of their 75-second runs airborne, much like their freestyle motocross kin. They are a mix of motorized racers and mountain-trained athletes, a combination, as it turns out, that is wholly X.
“It definitely bridges a gap, and it’s not just a snowmobile-specific gap but it’s a lifestyle and cultural gap,” said Chris Stiepock, general manager of ESPN’s X Games. “You look over at the snocross course and you see a lot of race fans wearing their colors. Freestyle snowmobilers have the respect of that crowd, and yet they are also drawing the snowboard and ski crowd.”
Winter X ringleaders have long eyed the mountain slednecks for inclusion in their winter circus. Made popular by niche movies and even more niche events like the Red Bull Fuel & Fury, freestyle slednecks are opening eyes to the possibilities of man and machine in the snowiest wilds. These are athletes who push their customized 500-pound machines straight up 60-degree avalanche paths, reaching the loftiest heights before flying off 60-foot cliffs on the way down. At their X debut, the big trick – really the money trick for athletes eyeing the podium – was a laid-out backflip or two over the 110-foot jump.
“I’m definitely more comfortable dropping cliffs and checking out natural terrain than I am on that course,” said Breckenridge’s Jay Quinlan, a helicopter flight instructor and expert skier internationally renowned for his audacious backcountry antics on a snowmobile. “I’m coming more from skiing and I relate more to skiing, that’s for sure.”
Freestyle snowmobilers are few in number and even fewer when asked to venture down from the hills to test their hucking mettle on a man-made course. Especially a race course hastily converted to a winding freestyle course with a few pointing-straight-up metal ramps and bermed turns on the snocross course doubling as landings.
“We really should have had our own area,” said Quinlan, 27, who endured hard-to-fix carburetor problems that ultimately left his snowmobile sputtering mid-jump, sending him painfully plummeting into the backside of a landing in a qualifying heat. “I’m not sure that course really gave the true nature of what we are doing.”
Nevertheless, the international stage of X certainly elevates the sport. The X elevator will attract sponsors. Sponsors can help the sport’s best focus solely on snowmobiling. Athletes get better. New tricks emerge. The sport grows. And more athletes start lining up at sponsor doors.
It’s the cycle of all action sports. But freestyle snowmobiling has a peculiar twist. Where new-school skiing and snowboarding athletes grow their skills on man-made courses and only recently have begun ferrying those skills into the steep-and-deep backcountry, freestyle snowmobilers are bringing their skills down from the hills for urban display.
“A lot of people thought we should have been here a long time ago, but I don’t think so. We’ve needed time to grow the sport and … build people into the sport and build our skills,” said Frisby, a Red Bull-sponsored heavyweight in the freestyle world who took bronze Sunday. “It’s a great time to be here and we need to be here.”
The top athletes in freestyle – such as Quinlan, Frisby and Kremmling’s Chris Burandt – think their efforts will offer the public a new perspective on snowmobiling. There’s more to snowmobiling than racing in circles or sitting down and gently touring the groomed glades.
“What we are doing is a whole other ballgame,” said Burandt, a snowmobile dealer from Kremmling whose laid-out and sickly huge backflip Sunday delivered the 28-year-old the first X Games freestyle snowmobiling gold. “We are showing people this is an extreme sport. While it’s as extreme as you want to make it, the opportunity to go out and improve on what’s being done is endless.”
But the biggest and most progressive steps in freestyle snowmobiling won’t be seen on ESPN prime time. The most unimaginable tricks will be realized in backcountry powder sessions.
“The sport is going to grow and progress in the backcountry for sure, but those backcountry guys will soon be saying, ‘Hey, I can do it back there so why don’t I try to go compete?”‘ said Burandt, who has ridden in seven of the 10 influential sledneck movies. “People are pushing it more and more in the backcountry, and really, the problem will come when you have to take time away from riding powder to hit ramps.
“Freestyle is on the bubble right now, and maybe we offer a happy medium of both the race side and the powder side.”
Staff writer Jason Blevins can be reached at 303-954-1374 or jblevins@denverpost.com.
