In early 2022, I was invited out to Duluth, Minnesota for the rebirth of what turned out to be a pretty incredible event steeped in street snowboarding history: Red Bull Heavy Metal. Admittedly, I’d never heard of it but then again, not many people had because it had died off two decades before. That 2022 version was launched with a mission to breath life back into the street snowboarding scene by giving reverence to its roots – and Duluth’s Cascade Park was the perfect place.
Street snowboarding is a big deal in the Midwest because, well, it’s not like backcountry pillow lines are readily available. The beauty of that is that the love and passion for their slice of the sport is just as intense as any lifelong powder hound in the Sierra. That entire lakeside town (I’m not exaggerating) showed up to Cascade Park that day, old and young, all missing a Sunday of NFL playoff games. I spent most of my day talking to people who’d lived next to the park for decades and shared stories of watching kids come out to session the park’s iconic 50-foot down rail running straight through the Hart Plaza Amphitheater. To somebody who didn’t grow up around this discipline of the sport, it was a helluva show. It was one giant freestyle session (and party) more than it was a competition.
Red Bull has stepped it up since then, pulling off something in 2024 that represents a big leap for the street scene. They convinced the powers that be in the city of St. Paul to hold the event on the steps of the state capitol building. Locations, of course, are everything in a sport like this. And just like skateboarding, it’s not like hitting massive kink rails on the steps of a government building is a common thing.
“Not only does the rail or ledge or wall need to align with the physics required for snowboarding, but mainly, it needs to be possible to hit it before being kicked out – by neighbors, by security guards, or most seriously – by the authorities,” Red Bull’s Mary Walsh says.
There are plenty who’d argue a sport like snowboarding should never sniff this kind of mainstream acceptance — that the punk rock roots of surfing, skateboarding, or snowboarding make this kind of scene sacrilege. And that’s fine. But I think you can chalk it up as a W when the mayor of a major city stands in front of his capitol building, a winch positioned not far behind, and tells 32 professional athletes to have at it.
“When it comes to snowboarding in the streets, NBD (Never Been Done) is often applied to new tricks done at locations they were previously unthinkable,” Walsh says. “But every once in a while, the location itself falls into the NBD category.”
