What do you do when you’re craving big snow lines to rip on your board, but there’s no snow? Piotr Szwedowski headed to the Sudety Mountains to carve a massive coal slag heap while waiting on the white stuff.
Winter 2016 hasn’t exactly been the white, frosty affair we’re used to in northern Europe, and our man in Poland has been craving some big lines on his snowboard but been staring blankly at closed slopes for lack of snow.
Not only is this a way of getting a similar feeling in a different sport for Piotr, but a way to fall back in love with mountain biking.
Katharsis.
I live in Sudety Mountains in Poland, it’s the perfect place to spot great lines but sometimes it’s no quite so straighforward.
I call this kind of riding “katharsis” because its something that you cannot try. You have to do it or don’t because when you start descent there is no way of stopping until the end of the run. It clears my mind and it solves all kinds of problems in my head.
Freeride isn’t dead.
I have been living for riding bikes since ’98-’99 and that story is about kind of loss in MTB for me. I was a freerider on Banshee Factory Team a decade ago and now all those new trends, wheel size, enduro hype made me go back to bmx trails, digging and more jump-orientated riding. Finally this autumn I found my path in MTB again and it’s old school natural freeride.
The unrideable line.
The story is about that drive and feeling to realise your goal and ride down almost unrideable line that you spotted months ago. Lines that become my obsession.
I have big freeride tattoo on my belly I had done it 15 years ago and now I have come full circle…
“Those” lines.
I’m a snowboarder, so riding “those” lines is the best way to get that powder snowboarding feeling without the snow. There is a huge slag heap next to an old closed coal mine. I spotted it on one of my motorcycle trips and I was waiting for heavy rains and close to 0 temperature to have little bit more grip on that loose descent.
Spoils.
Finally I hit when the weather was perfect. During the Communist days coal mining in Sudety Mountains was a big thing but now everything is closed. It’s bad for local economy and we have a lot of old mining “architecture” around here.
Perfect lines.
I’m obsessed with my “perfect lines” thinking about them, searching them out and now I love mountain biking again!
