Appetite for Construction: How Red Bull Rampage Builds the Most Dangerous Bike Jumps in the World

More than 250 million years ago, in the Triassic period, what is now western Utah was a broad coastal flat of the supercontinent Pangaea. The Moenkopi Formation, as it is known, saw five million years’ worth of sedimentary layers—gypsum, siltstone, mudstone—dumped onto the flats by oceans and rivers.

Nearly 200 million years later, the gradual seismic uplift of the Colorado Plateau produced a rugged topography, sculpted over time by wind and water into a craggy collection of buttes, canyons, and mesas. Today that ancient sedimentation, hoisted upward and exposed to air, is visible in the form of striking multi-hued bands.

One of those uplift features, known as Gooseberry Mesa, just south of Virgin, Utah, is a huge flat-topped butte with a towering 5,200 feet of elevation, prized by mountain bikers for its lunar-like slickrock surface. Trailing away from Gooseberry like an alligator tail is a long, thin, jagged ridge that has lost its protective caprock surface. In the slow march of geologic time, it is crumbling away.

For the past two years, this ridge has been home to Red Bull Rampage, the world’s most famous—some might say infamous—freeride mountain-bike event, which each year generates a torrent of jaw-dropping footage, streamed live to hundreds of thousands of viewers, along with hand-wringing social media posts from fans and pundits wondering if this is the year it all went just a bit too far.

Like its counterpart in snowboarding, freeriding began as a maverick pursuit, with early-nineties mountain bikers attempting to ride the seemingly unrideable. “We sent it as raw as we could,” says Brett Tippie, a former pro who helped pioneer the sport in Kamloops, British Columbia. “We might kick a few stones out of the way, but it was basically raw mountain.” The first Rampage, in 2001, had the same DIY spirit, but over time the lines have become more engineered, the runs more flowy and trick filled, the jumps bigger and the stakes higher. To date, no one has died at Rampage, but serious injuries are not uncommon—in 2015, a crash left the rider Paul Basagoitia paralyzed.

The goal of Rampage is to descend from a wooden platform just below Gooseberry Mesa to the finish corral, more than 600 feet below, in less than three minutes. Riders get two chances. Along the way, navigating that ancient sedimentary geology, they perform any number of tricks, from Supermans to suicide no-handers, no-foots to nac-nacs, tailwhips to front flips. Each ride is scored on the difficulty of the line, control and fluidity, air and amplitude, and style.

(Rampage, much to the ire of the freeride community, has always been an all-male affair. This year, Red Bull halted its fledgling women’s event, called Formation. The company says it’s “postponed” and is working on an eventual return.)

What makes Rampage unique in the world of action sports—all sports, really—is that instead of riding a set course, each participant, equipped with his own two-person dig crew, constructs his own line: a terrifying succession of chutes, jumps, step-downs, canyon gaps, and landings, shaped within a landscape so challenging, it’s not uncommon to see builders tied in with safety ropes. The tamest moments of these craggy thrill rides would rank among the sickest features at any downhill park. (Some Rampage riders, for example, have practiced on a notorious, semisecret local line called King Kong, considered so dangerous that it’s omitted from most trail maps.) “Normally, you come to an event and everything’s ready—you just have to train,” says Louis Reboul, a Frenchman working on the dig team of the Belgian pro Thomas “Tommy G” Genon. “You come here, you have to compete but also dig your line for four days, which is pretty exhausting.” Picture a PGA event in which golfers manicure fairways, pour lakes, and install bunkers before playing the course—except you’re clambering up a mountain to break rocks in the desert heat, building features that have a nontrivial chance of landing you in the hospital.

Rampage kicks off with an initial no-tools “scope day”—course recon during which riders plot out their runs, based on a highly individual calculus of riding style (e.g. flowy slopestyle tricks versus raw big-mountain air) and appetite for risk (some returning from injury opt for a more conservative approach). “I wanted a bit of big-mountain feel,” Talus Turk, a rookie rider who lives in Virgin, told me, “but then add some rhythm and flow.” He’d been drawn to the line built by Ethan Nell at last year’s Rampage, and Turk was even using a builder from Nell’s crew, Ryan McNulty. While the line had a good “skeleton,” Turk and his crew tweaked it. “There wasn’t much going on up on the ridge, so we added two jumps.”

The teams have four days to construct their lines, using hand tools like shovels, picks, and rakes. They are also given 75 sandbags, generally used as foundation for jumps and landings, interleaved with flat pieces of shale the diggers call dinner plates. Past Rampages saw power tools and teams of unlimited size; current restrictions were put in place in 2015 and 2016 to reduce the environmental impact and level the playing field. (As one rider joked to me about observing another at work, “I looked over and he had like 11 guys, generators, lights, power tools—I wasn’t in that league.”) In years past, workers hired by Red Bull built large wooden features, but these were eschewed in pursuit of a more natural feel.

After the four-day build and a mandatory rest day, riders spend another four practicing their lines, though in reality they are often still building—even up to the morning of the competition. The biggest change in the lives of builders, as Darren “the Claw” Berrecloth—a veteran competitor from the early 2000s, and a judge at this year’s event—suggests to me one afternoon as we hike the course, is neither tools nor team size but water. “That really changed the game,” he says. Previously, water, which is used as a binding agent, had to be hauled up in jerricans loaded onto ATVs, limiting its use. A few years ago, however, a source was discovered on Gooseberry Mesa, and now it flows down through a system of hoses. “It’s changed what we can create, what we can ride,” says Berrecloth. Dylan Coburn, a digger with D. J. Brandt, a rider from Denver, says that water has also made things somewhat safer for competitors. “You’d have riders go and hit stuff and then blow up because the landings are soft—you stick it and get chucked,” he says. “It’s an added safety feature for sure.”

Walking the course’s thin, snaking paths, gazing out at dozens of shirtless men pickaxing rock, tamping down landings, or rappelling steep inclines, enveloped in a near constant cloud of dust, I can’t help but think of the Brazilian gold-mine scenes in Godfrey Reggio’s 1988 film Powaqqatsi. Squint a bit and the earthen berms, the carefully formed mound-like ramps, and the twisting, plummeting paths can seem like the ruins of some ancient city, deep in the Utah badlands, the prosperity of which depended on getting things from the top of the mountain to the bottom as fast as possible.

In the days before the event, I kept hearing people talk about the Battleship—a sort of mini mesa at the top of the ridge, separated from the surrounding rock by a small chasm and resembling its namesake fighting vessel. In the string of years the competition has been held at this site, it has never been incorporated into anyone’s line. I could see why. Hiking up to it one morning, I found myself in its shadow, on a very narrow path, surrounded by steep drops. The chatter on the hill was that several riders would be attempting it. “Is the Battleship fucked, or does it just have fucked consequences?” I heard one digger ask another.

Several weeks earlier Brendan Fairclough, a popular English rider who was returning to the event for the first time in four years, was sitting with one of his dig crew, Olly Wilkins, in a coffee shop in Surrey, poring over Google Earth images of the Rampage course. The Battleship caught their eye. “It’s a huge part of the mountain that’s been looked at the past 12 years and no one’s ever done it,” says Fairclough, known almost universally as Brendog. And so, on the first day of Rampage, Wilkins says, “we literally ran to the top of the hill to look at it, because it was our only plan.”

What might have appeared imposing on Google Earth was, in person, “truly awful,” Wilkins says. “The most horrible thing about the Battleship feature is that it’s not stable,” he explains. “You’re up there with a pick and you can feel it move. I really wouldn’t be surprised if in the next ten years that thing disappears.” There were no good footholds. If simply working on it was harrowing, imagine jumping a mountain bike onto it, from ten or so feet away, landing on a loose-dirt surface some four feet wide—with a severe, rocky drop on either side. “When you’re up there on a bike, there’s no nice way of falling off,” says Wilkins. “It’s honestly one of the most terrifying things,” says Fairclough, who admits to being kept up at night by the looming slab. “It’s just so exposed.”

All this, perversely, is what made the Battleship perfect for Fairclough. “From Brendan’s perspective, he’s not going to pull out a cash roll or a bar spin,” says Wilkins. “You have to showcase what the rider is good at—and I would say he is one of the best in the world at riding awful features.”

Rampage diggers are doing more than putting in punishing 12-hour days in the dirt. They are teammates in a very real sense, using their experience (most are skilled freeriders themselves) not only to help build the best lines but get their riders to the finish corral in one piece. Says Fairclough, “You want someone in your team who can say, ‘No, Brendan, I think that’s a stupid idea.’ That’s super crucial, because you’re in this insane environment where you’re surrounded by other like-minded idiots who want to jump off crazy stuff.”

Kyle Strait, a.k.a. the Natty Daddy, who would go on to win the event’s Toughness award—after breaking his back on a practice run the year before—calls it the “craziest partnership.” You can’t just grab any mountain biker who’s built backyard ramps, he notes. He tries to bring the same crew every year. “I fucking love these guys,” he says. “We literally rely on them, whether it’s checking speed into a new drop, or the opinion of how a landing should be.”

In hindsight, he says, his failure to heed builder Mitch Ropelato’s advice on last year’s run contributed to his crash. As often happens at Rampage, the team was racing to finish their build before competition day. “Mitch was like, ‘I don’t really like it, I’m not feeling it,’ ” Strait says. “And I’m convincing him, and me, ‘Hey, I think we got it—we have no more time.’ Realistically, that’s what took me out.” Strait, like the other comparatively older riders I met, seemed less an adrenaline junkie than someone soberly aware of the actuarial extremities of his profession. Wearing a logo-bedecked work shirt and a straw cowboy hat after his ride, he wouldn’t have looked out of place at a Nascar race.

To save time, some returning riders will revisit their past lines, tweaking and improving them; teams will also pool efforts to construct features or even entire runs. Carson Storch, a 30-year-old rider from Bend, Oregon, who started competing at Rampage when he was 21, tells me that he’s sharing 95 percent of his line with fellow rider Tom Van Steenbergen. “We’re both coming off injuries in 2021,” he says. “We were in a similar head space where we just wanted to tone it back a little bit and be smart and strategic about our build.” Would that hurt him in the eyes of the judges? “We’re completely different riders,” he says. “We do separate tricks and have our own style.” In the end, sharing the line didn’t seem to hurt. They took their second runs at the same time, just for fun—and both ended up on the podium.

As we approach a smoothly curved ramp that juts into the sky, Berrecloth points to some small stones arrayed in two sets of lines toward the lip of the jump. These are directional cues. “Because a lot of the takeoffs are blind, you can’t see the landing when you’re coming in,” he says. “Especially on the higher stuff, where it’s consequential.” Those stones could be the difference between hitting a landing and hitting a wall. “In years past, people have accidentally kicked the rocks,” he says. “I personally have rolled up to things and my rocks are gone.”

For all the mind-bending assaults on physics and staggering technical panache displayed on the mountain, building and riding Rampage is a surprisingly lo-fi affair. While there were rumors of someone having a digital range finder, and a couple of tape measures were spooled out over drops, most of what happens up there runs on experience and intuition—“lad science,” as Fairclough and his team jokingly call it.

Strait argues that knowing the exact distance of a canyon jump could actually be detrimental. “A tape measure, a speedometer, anything that’s going to tell you a number—that number means nothing,” he says. Think about something as simple as throwing a piece of paper into a garbage can, he says: “You get pretty good at it—even if you move the can, you’re like, ‘I’ll just do this.’ But if you tell someone, you need to throw it by this number and this number, that’s not going to be a thing.” Fairclough adds: “Not knowing is better for the head.”

Having a mathematically dialed-in ride could work against the rider, because in these conditions no two rides are ever the same. The famed Russian neurophysiologist Nikolai Bernstein suggested that a key to sports improvement is “repetition without repetition”—practicing a single skill slightly differently each time. The dirt might get softer, the density of the air might change, the light may be different. Turk points out how sometimes “you’ll be in a section with light and there will be a shadow landing, so you feel like you’re jumping into a black abyss.”

By far the biggest environmental factor at Rampage, however, is wind, as evidenced by the half-dozen or so windsocks hung prominently along the course. Riders tend to practice jumps in the morning because, owing to changes in atmospheric temperature, Utah’s winds pick up in the afternoon. “Our bikes are big sails,” says Berrecloth. “It’s quite a bit of surface area for the wind to push and pull.” A few days earlier, we’d seen a LifeFlight helicopter taking off in the distance. It was carrying the English rider Gee Atherton, who’d crashed on a 60-foot drop. “He got blown in the wind, and it put him off-kilter a bit,” says Berrecloth. Atherton sustained multiple skull and vertebra fractures; on Instagram, he called the injuries “not too bad.” He appeared briefly at the event’s after-party in a brace enveloping his neck and back.

Rampage is a game of inches. Builders will construct a ramp, riders will approach it a few times to gauge the speed required, then they’ll “guinea-pig it” and report back to the diggers. Guinea-pigging on that inaugural test run, Storch says, is one of the “scariest parts” of the event, so starting conservative is a risk-management tool. “A lot of people will build a big drop with a flat lip just to test it,” he says. “But they want to flip it, so they’ll kick the lip up a little bit.”

Timing is also key. “You have to be strategic about what you finish first, so you have stuff to ride once practice starts,” says Storch. Even then riders are likely to be still digging. I found Cam Zink, this year’s winner, in the finish corral at the end of the event surrounded by a ring of well-wishers. “The whole first week you’re just beating your head against a rock—picking, shoveling, hauling everything,” he said. “Then you figure you’re finished, you can practice more. But as soon as you do a practice run, the wind picks up. You change your boots and you go right back to digging.”

In the end, it’s not entirely clear which is harder: building the lines or sending them. “You spend eight days digging, your hands are ripped to pieces and you feel like you’ve got arthritis, then you have to go and test the massive features you’ve just built,” says Fairclough. Getting to the finish corral comes down to strategy as much as skill. “It’s this huge weigh-up of time management and energy management and having the right crew around you. It’s not just chucking yourself off a cliff.”