The Snowboarder's Journal - The Snowboarder's Journal 19.1
DAM BOYS: Reservoirs of Potential in Austria
Words: Ben Shanks Kindlon 2021-09-27 14:48:21
“Our first real sessions on the dams were in 2003. We revisited them in 2013. In the decade in between Wolle developed his highly functional Äsmo Powsurfers—boards without bindings. Even in 2003 I had doubts about what was possible, yet always left with a sense of awe and accomplishment. To see Wolle throwing 50-foot-long laybacks down the face of the dam 10 years later without even strapping in was a spectacle—a celebration of dreams, vision and perseverance.” Photo: Scott Sullivan
Standing at 430 feet tall and 2,400 feet wide, Schlegeis is one of five massive hydroelectric dams located in western Austria’s Ziller Valley. The gargantuan structure looks like a towering wave of cement nestled uniformly into the picturesque landscape of the Alps. A miles-wide reservoir rests on one side of the wall, with mountainous terrain pushing up against the other. It took six years to construct this leviathan levee, completed in 1971 and producing electricity in Mayrhofen a year later. It’s also one of the largest rideable pieces of concrete in the world.
Winter 2008: Wolle Nyvelt is gearing up to snowboard down Schlegeis. In the air above him hangs Absinthe Films Director Justin Hostynek, soon to be zooming by on a zip line. Justin is on a homemade rig, hoping like hell his sketchy setup won’t send him crashing at high speed into the wall. Following a hair-raising trial run, the crew films a groundbreaking lead-cam shot for Absinthe’s Ready—one of several clips they have captured over the years at these truly iconic spots.
The cable-cam session wasn’t the first time Wolle snowboarded a dam like Schlegeis. His initial experience went down at the nearby Zillergründl Dam in ’98, but no one was around to film it. Roads to the dam are closed to the public during winter due to avalanche danger, but Wolle’s dad, Heinz, worked for the power company that operates the dam, giving Wolle access to the area. “I grew into a family of people working at hydro dams,” Wolle says. “My grandpa worked there, my dad worked there. One day they had a helicopter going up to Zillergründl and he said, ‘Do you want to come and take a flight with us?’ I got a heli drop by myself on a nearby peak and rode down to the dam, then I dropped in on it for the first time. My dad shot some photos from the top, they’re super blurry. I didn’t even touch the concrete. Then we came back and filmed it for Absinthe Films’ Saturation. That’s when we got a real taste of it.”
In Satruation we see Wolle hauling downslope alongside Zillergründl’s wall before attacking it backside, riding out onto the gritty cement and then catching the snowy transition at the bottom of the bank. He cuts a heelside turn, rips another wallride and smashes back into powder at the bottom. Gabe Langlois filmed the shot—an awesome, fast-paced culmination of freeriding and jibbing—and Justin says the footage blew him away. “I’d heard they’d ridden a dam, but I hadn’t seen anything,” Justin says. “With 16mm film you’ve got to wait to get your transfer back, and when I finally saw his footage come in it was like, ‘Man, we got something really special.’” Wolle soon returned to Zillergründl with his good friend, Roland “Roli” Schwaninger, where they built a skatepark-inspired over-vert snow cradle. You can see the resulting shots in Wolle’s segment for Pop (2004), which are followed by him spinning a cab five into the wall at Schlegeis. Each trip to the hydroelectric dams inspired new possibilities, eventually leading to the Absinthe crew’s remarkable session at Schlegeis in 2008.
Similar to Wolle’s warm-ups prior to this session, this wasn’t the first time Justin had used a zipline to capture a lead-cam snowboard shot for one of his films. He’d had mixed success with it in Utah in 2006, when he set one up inbounds at Brighton Resort, as well as in the Wasatch backcountry when he filmed with Gigi Rüf and Kurt Wastell for Ready. Justin took a vicious slam on one of the zip lines when his crew missed its window to slow him down and he crashed into the tree that was serving as his bottom anchor point. The following year Justin got his friend, Caleb Patterson, to help him dial in the DIY setup. “Caleb is an arborist and a snowboarder; he was actually one of the guys who built the [Red Bull] Supernatural course [at Baldface Lodge],” Justin says. “He’s still one of my best friends and I trust him the most out of anyone I’ve worked with in these situations. I flew him over to Austria with all the ropes and he, Wolle and Eric Brandt spent a week putting it together at the dam.”
Along with help from some Schlegeis employees and an Austrian climber named Ube who rappelled in from the top to set the first anchor, the crew assembled the zip line rig with holes drilled directly into the wall of the dam. Suspended from the cable was Justin’s seat: an upside-down skateboard with grip tape stuck to the base and a Spacecraft sticker on the opposite side. They named the rig, “the Spacecraft.”
“The first run was sketchy,” Justin says. “I had long hair at the time and I realized if I wasn’t wearing a beanie, I could get my hair caught in these pulleys and get scalped going at those speeds. The other guys were up at the top with heavy gloves on, but when you’ve got 180 pounds zooming down the line, good luck. I was wearing a harness and I had a carabiner with a daisy chain connecting me to the Spacecraft, so there wasn’t an option to jump. I basically had to run out of speed on the uphill side of the line and hope that I didn’t run into the cement wall. But it worked out.”
Considering all the prep work along with the inherent danger of both the riding and filming that was involved, the Schlegeis session was intense. Timing for the cable-cam had to be precise, and Wolle’s line wasn’t exactly a cruise down the bunny slope. “The concrete that dam is made of makes it look like a big, smooth wallride, but it is so gnarly,” Justin says. “He was doing these big laybacks and his board and gloves would be annihilated after every run. It’s really sketchy.” Through a strong collective effort, they nailed the shot—one that made all the effort worthwhile. “With a lead cam, it gives an element of surprise because the viewer doesn’t see what’s coming next until it enters the shot,” Justin says. “I really wanted to shoot it lead-cam and at the time there wasn’t any way to do that. There weren’t any drones—well, drones were being used in the war, but they weren’t being used to film snowboarding at all. It’s an exciting way to show something that was also new at the time, so I’m really hyped on those shots.”
True to form, Wolle didn’t stop there. He returned to Schlegeis in 2015 with an Asmo snowsurfer and rode across a section of the wall without the help of bindings. “It’s hard to understand how gnarly that is,” Justin says. “No bindings? The world still doesn’t know how gnarly any of that stuff was.” Wolle’s latest session on the dams went down while he and Steve Gruber were filming for Absinthe Film’s final full-length movie, Channel Zero, released in 2020. In the film you can hear how their edges grind abrasively across the wall’s gritty surface, giving you a better sense of just how unforgiving it really was. “You wreck your boards when you go there,” Wolle says. “After each run you’ve got to put more wax on, and your edges are pretty much gone. If you eat shit, you eat shit pretty bad.”
Despite all they’ve accomplished at the hydroelectric dams, Wolle says these spots still offer plenty more potential. “The climate there is kind of weird and there’s a lot of wind that curves around the wall, so for the transition to be really perfect, you need to know when the snow is good to go,” he says. “To get it with pow doesn’t happen that often. But we’ll go back when we have a mission. Maybe there’ll be a few years’ break, but I’m sure we’ll end up back there, hopefully with a bigger crew. There are rails at the top, and if somebody like Louif [Paradis] saw this spot, he could do some crazy stuff on it. In the right moment with the right riders, there’s way heavier stuff that could go down there.”
Justin concurs. “There’s still mad potential on those things,” he says. “On those dams, or just those kinds of wallrides in general, and there’s a lot of them around the world.”
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