PHOTO: Scott Sullivan
RIDER: Travis Rice
SPOT: Chad’s Gap
LOCATION: Grizzly Gulch, Utah
CAMERA: Canon EOS 5D
Twenty years ago, Travis Rice and Romain De Marchi sessioned Chad’s Gap, located in Little Cottonwood Canyon, Utah. From takeoff to knuckle, the gap measured 110-feet across. The in-run was a quarter of a mile long and perfectly sculpted. The jump took three full days to hand-build. Had the Absinthe filmer Shane Charlebois not coordinated the shoot, no one would have believed it had happened. But he did. Charlebois’ chutzpah cemented De Marchi’s superstar status and catapulted Rice’s career to new heights.
According to Absinthe Films cofounder, Justin Hostynek, “The group dynamic and timing were critical. In 1999, local skier Chad Zurinskas and the French freestyle skier Candide Thovex filmed the first ever Chad’s Gap session, but no one had ever captured world class snowboarders hitting it. Shane felt Romain and Travis would push each other to up the ante over the gap. Though they were friends, it was their rivalry that created the right chemistry on-hill that day.”
The Absinthe crew made sure to capture the action from multiple angles. Charlebois covered the distance angle on Camera One, capturing critical shots of each rider from takeoff to landing. Pete O’Brien covered the highlights angle on Camera Two, capturing in-runs, extreme wide-angles, and b-roll of the riders. Hostynek captured tracking shots from a helicopter on Camera Three. From various vantage points on the ground, the photographers Stan Evans and Scott Sullivan captured stills, many of which ran in magazines and as brand campaigns around the world.
“We had enough budget to pay for one tank of Jet A [helicopter fuel],” says Hostynek, “which allowed for about two-hours of flight time. We made every hit count.”
Rice was the first to drop in. On his initial attempt, he overshot the landing by approximately 50-feet. Thereafter, he stomped three tricks: cab-720, switch backside-540, and a backside rodeo-720.
After Rice, De Marchi stepped up to nail the Chicane; a trick made famous by the beloved 90s superpro Kevin Jones. For those of you who do not know what a Chicane is, don’t worry. Almost no one does. It is a cab barrel roll-540 thingy. Even off of a relatively small hit, it is a difficult shred maneuver. That De Marchi did it over Chad’s Gap is astonishing. After nailing the Chicane, he stomped a massive backside-180.
Word of mouth spread fast and wide. Once the footage and photos started coming out, Chad’s Gap was soon understood to be the biggest jump ever sessioned by snowboarders. At the time, the only sender of comparable size was Kurt Wastell’s 112-foot backside-360 on the “Berzerker” hit, documented during Snowboarder Magazine’s Superpark event in 1999.
Over the past 20-years, much has been made of Rice and De Marchi’s achievements that day, all of which can be viewed and studied in the Absinthe Films classic, POP. “When the film dropped that year, it expanded people’s minds about what was doable on a snowboard,” says Hostynek, “The size. The scope. The stomp. It changed everything.”
But the backstory of Chad’s Gap doesn’t end here. For the tale of how Chad’s Gap came to be is equally interesting.
Chad’s Gap is made of two colossal tailings piles. At some point in the 20th Century, an industrial mining company created these mounds side-by-side. Tailings are the fine-grained waste materials left after a target mineral has been extracted from ore. Often, mining companies pile these materials very high, creating knolls, hills, and other man-made terrain features. By chance, these particular piles were placed vertically in-line with one another, creating a natural fall-line and a perfect distance for an athlete to jump between two points.
During the 90s, the snowboarders Andy Brewer, Jason Brown, Jeff Davis, Terje Haakonsen, Tarquin Robbins, Quinn Sandvold and countless others sessioned jumps on the lower tailings pile. According to photographer Brent Benson, “Andy Brewer was the first one to mention it to me. He thought skiers could jump it. He used to call it “The Nipple.” So Chad and I went up there and looked at it, and Chad said he could do it.”
The Chad in this story is, of course, Chad Zurinskas, a local skier and chef at The Lodge Bistro at Snowbird Resort.
In January of 1999, photographer Benson captured stills while Kris Ostness filmed Zurinskas and Thovex for the Wind Up Films feature Clay Pigeons. This was the first-ever Chad’s Gap session. During the session, says Benson, “Ostness named it “Chad’s Gap” because he was the first to guinea pig it.”
Five years later, during their two-hour session in 2004, De Marchi, Rice, and Absinthe Films made snowboarding history at Chad’s Gap. But for this to happen, decades of incremental, unrelated, and visionary events had to first fall into place. Serendipity is real.