It’s four in the afternoon, getting dark and pouring rain on the last day of our late-February trip to Helsinki, Finland. Seems like a good time to set up a drop from the top of a parking garage. Simon Gschaider had eyed it on the first day of our weeklong trip—an ollie over a fence to an angled metal bank meant for sliding snow off the top of the parking structure, roughly two stories off the ground. It looks to line up nicely with the pile of snow that’s been accumulating on the street below. But the landing is surely too far away. 

A chill young man with a little excavator showed up on the first day and told us he’d be around pushing snow off the slide all week long. He knew what we were onto and was personally all right with it, but kindly asked that we leave his worksite. Although the trick looked unrealistic—too big, too far—for Simon there was no doubt he would hit it. He visited it every day, sometimes two or three times, and found the man there with his excavator, pushing snow down the ramp. Even as the trip went on and the weather worsened, Simon never gave up on his idea…

Buy issue

Subscribe to start your collection of The Snowboarder’s Journal.