A Love Letter to Bourdo’s Drop.

Bourdon rode it in New World Disorder 7. Tyler knew the hillside and roughly where in Utah it was located. Countless hours were spent searching both physically and on google maps, he asked around and wouldn’t give up. Eventually, somebody who had been there when Bourdon rode it sent him a pin.

There’s a strange familiarity to finally standing somewhere you’ve watched on film for years. You recognize the feature, the surrounding terrain, then get underneath it and remember how much cameras lie about scale. The feature sat across the basin, surrounded by pale dirt, broken rock and ancient rock art, looking exactly like the thing from the film and considerably less reasonable in person.

The run-in crossed an off-camber section and put Tyler close to the edge while he still needed to make the turn toward the takeoff. The landing wasn’t square to the lip, the wind moved around the basin, and the dirt looked soft enough to stop a front wheel dead. Tyler called one of the boys from the In The Hills Gang, and the advice was simple: scrape it off.

So the shovel came out. The finished film might show a rider floating through some enormous landscape, but getting there often means hours moving dirt around in the sun. Tyler worked on the landing and run-in until he could visualize landing it, then started checking his speed. Isaac Wallen, Nic Genovese and I spread out lower in the basin with long lenses while Tyler made a few run-ins and watched the wind.

Eventually the radio crackled, and through it we could hear Avenged Sevenfold’s “Bat Country,” the same song that played under Bourdon’s original segment. That little detail somehow made the whole thing feel more real. Then Tyler’s voice came over the radio: “Dropping in ten.”

Ten seconds is a surprising amount of time when you know what’s about to happen. I checked my settings again, and again just to try and ease my anxiety of getting one chance to get the shot. Tyler appeared on the ridge, crossed the slope, made the turn and left the ground. Through a long lens, the desert suddenly gave the drop its scale. Tyler kept falling against an enormous amount of empty space before the bike started coming back toward the landing. He put it down clean, and between Tyler at the bottom and the three of us scattered across the basin, four people made a stupid amount of noise.

I checked the back of the camera and had the whole sequence, sharp from run-in to landing. As far as I was concerned, we had it. Then I hustled over to Isaac and Nic and immediately noticed Nic didn’t think the same.

Nic kept replaying the clip and seemed reluctant to be the first person to say what he’d seen. He’s spent years behind the camera with riders like Brandon Semenuk and Kade Edwards, shot projects including Afterlife and Parallel II, and co-directed Motive. His eye is calibrated to a level where a tiny movement can change an otherwise perfect clip. Right before the lip, Tyler had put in one extra pedal stroke. It was barely anything, and I hadn’t noticed it through my camera, but the second Nic pointed it out we all saw it. The bitch crank.

Most people would never notice it, but once Nic pointed it out you couldn’t stop seeing it. Nobody was keen to tell Tyler that he had just ridden Bourdo’s drop clean but needed another go because of one pedal stroke. We all knew Nic was right, and as soon as Tyler watched the clip, he knew it too. He picked the bike up and started hiking.

While Tyler hiked back up, the wind started lifting dust across the basin and I went back through the first sequence. I liked what I had, but now that we were doing it again, I wanted to make the second chance count, so I moved farther across the basin to an angle that gave the drop more scale. The feeling had shifted slightly by then. The first attempt had answered the big question, because Tyler had ridden it clean, but now everyone knew exactly what needed to happen and exactly what they were looking for.

Tyler checked the run-in again and waited for the wind to settle. It took a while, but eventually the atmosphere went still enough and the radio crackled for the second time: “Dropping in ten.”

He came across the hillside already carrying the speed he needed, made the turn and this time there was no correction before the lip. He simply left the ground and, from my new angle, I could see the full shape of it as he hung out over the desert with nothing underneath him before the bike started coming back toward the landing. He touched down exactly where he wanted to, rode it out, and that was it. Nic checked the clip, I checked the sequence, and for once nobody had anything to add. It was perfect.

Later, riding out in the last of the daylight, I followed the truck’s taillights while the basin behind us slowly went blue. I thought about what the photograph leaves out: Bourdon riding the feature twenty years earlier, Tyler remembering it, the searching, the digging, the first hit and one pedal stroke sending Tyler back up the hill. All of that gets compressed into 1/2000th of a second.

That’s part of why those old films still matter to me. They made impossible things look spontaneous, but anybody who has spent time around this knows how much work usually sits outside the frame.

Tyler was riding HUNT Enduro V3 wheels that day. There was no special build or prototype involved; they were simply the alloy Enduro wheels already on his bike. Those same rims are available separately in the US now, and they’ll end up built onto different hubs, raced, dented, repaired and rebuilt.

One photograph doesn’t prove a rim is indestructible, and that isn’t really the point. It does show the kind of riding we had in mind when we made it. When I look at the photograph, though, I mostly just hear the radio again: “Dropping in ten.”