Carlos Bastarache: p-20171028-00811

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VIRGIN, Utah – Josh Bender clearly isn’t afraid of heights. He’s got flip-flops on, a phone in one hand, and a bucket hat tilted slightly atop his head. Oh, and his young daughter is strapped into a Babybjörn, and she’s taking sips out of a Camelbak, unfazed by the mountains around her, the fact she’s more than 2/3 of a mile high at elevation, or that her dad has broken just about everything a person can break by biking off cliffs over the years. She must have caught her dad’s sense of adventure early.

Bender surveys the rocks and manmade jumps a day before Red Bull Rampage’s 2017 installment. There’s a quiet sense of satisfaction at seeing what has been built. Even if he gets nostalgic for the days when there were no rules and it was just a few friends who all shared the lack of a fear gene, he’s quick to admit how damn cool it is that Rampage has grown to this level. More people than ever want to scale these cliffs and risk their bones – and lives – to chase the ultimate thrill. More people than ever want to watch it, through a Red Bull TV livestream or an NBC broadcast on Sunday, Dec. 24. And more people than ever are making the pilgrimage to Utah to see it in person.

“People were like this event isn’t gonna last,” Bender says. “Nobody’s going to do this. But people saw this was a pretty cool event and it got a momentum build.”

Bender stops a second to readjust his hat and hand the Camelbak nozzle back to his daughter.

“Now it’s like who’s going to start riding backwards down these things. It’s gonna happen. Who’s doing it first?”

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As Bender notes, there’s nowhere else in the world with the shelf formations and the terrain that lend itself to an event like this. The craziest thing isn’t that anyone thought to want to ride bikes down it in the first place – it’s that they actually went and did it. Fast forward to 2017, and there are VIP tours, helicopter rides to see the course from above like some sort of Hot Wheels track on steroids, and thousands of people hiking (or biking) the miles-long trail to get to their vantage point to see competitors scale rock walls and drop dozens of meters to finish with a backflip flourish for the right to be judged on a ten-point scale.

All of this looks cool on YouTube, or streamed live, or in HD on network television, but there’s a disconnect between what you see and what you feel when you’re actually there. You can’t taste the dust, or watch the sky change colors seemingly in an instant. You can’t stare down hundreds of feet or pat down the earth you’re standing on to understand the dangerous yet exhilarating cocktail of technique and insanity it takes to do something like this. You can’t have spontaneous conversations with people who traveled from Nevada, from Oregon, from Wisconsin, because they had to come to Utah to see this for themselves.

We’re all lucky because we’ve never been able to have this much exposure to this many cool things a click away. We scroll our feeds and see some of the best drinks, meals, destinations, shoes, and concerts all at arm’s length. With that exposure comes a numbness. Inspiration is nothing without activation. And if we’re not pushed to actually enable our senses, the scroll becomes a river that washes us away.

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Rampage isn’t easy to get to. Most people couldn’t find Virgin on a map. Fewer still would know what airport to fly into. But once you’re there, time tends to bleed into the desert sky.

“We’re so fortunate,” Bender says. “It’s such a unique event because of where it’s at. Of what’s being done, and the progression it reaches every year. This event brings everyone out. You’re either riding or watching.”

As long as there are cliffs, hills, paths, or gaps, there are going to be those who want to scale, climb, ride, or jump them. Even if we don’t necessarily understand the rationalization behind it, sometimes you just have to be there.