That’s a solid crowd. Photo: Red Bull
In early 2022, a buddy reached out with an invitation to go to Duluth, Minnesota with him. Red Bull had been working to bring back an old, and I mean old, freestyle event in the lakeside town’s Cascade Park — a site with a deep, rich history in skating and freestyle snowboarding.
Growing up in Northern California, snowboarding to me had always been more about chasing powder days than looking for kink rails at a park, so the experience turned out to be an eye-opening one.
“Nearby Spirit Mountain is your quintessential small resort equipped with a bonafide tow rope for park rats and runs that couldn’t take more than four minutes from the moment you jump off the chair to the moment you’re right back in line at the bottom of the hill,” I wrote when I came home from the weekend in the midwest. “Backcountry powder days aren’t a thing here, so a healthy freestyle scene took hold decades ago.”
That Sunday at Red Bull Heavy Metal in Duluth — the first Heavy Metal in two decades — I was blown away by what seemed like the entire town showing up to watch a handful of park rats session at an unassuming, but beautiful, little park on a hill. In reality, there couldn’t have been more than 1,000 people in attendance during the event’s peak.
Fast forward just three years later and wow, props to the minds who revived this event. In 2023, Heavy Metal went to Detroit. Last year, organizers held a session on the steps of the capitol building in St. Paul, Minn. This year, they held two events. One in St. Paul again and another in Boston. Red Bull says more than 20,000 people showed up to watch the last one in Beantown.
“This is a major conventional sports city. It is good to see snowboarding getting some love in the best sports town in the nation,” said Chris Grenier, who hosted the event in Boston.
That’s a long, long way in a short, short time since bringing the old school freestyle event back to life.
