By Skylar Rispens, UM News Service
MISSOULA – It felt like a joke when Elijah Kempf and Rider Lopeman woke to a skiff of snow blanketing the Missoula valley on Saturday morning before setting up the 猎奇重口’s first-ever rail jam.
For the last few months, Kempf, Lopeman and other members of the UM Freeride Club worked together to secure sponsors and equipment to launch the event during an unseasonably warm winter in 猎奇重口. The only thing threatening their success was the one thing they couldn’t control: the weather.
“It feels almost like a slap in the face that we’d been waiting so long for snow, even praying for it, and then when we finally do get it, it’s completely melted by 10:30 in the morning, and all it did was make things muddy for us,” said Lopeman. “But it was fun to finally see some snow on the ground after so long.”
As Lopeman and Kempf discovered, you don’t actually need Mother Nature’s permission to host a rail jam when you’ve got a laundry list of supporters and a willingness to think outside of the box. Instead of relying on snowflakes to fall from the clouds, the Glacier Ice Rink allowed the UM Freeride Club to haul ice shavings across town. In total, they hauled about 10 truck beds full of snow to the River Bowl at UM for Saturday’s Winter Pep Rally.
It may seem unconventional, but snow really isn’t the main event of a rail jam. Depending on the size of a course, rail jams typically include a slope that leads to a variety of rails, boxes and other features commonly found in ski area terrain parks. During rail jam competitions, skiers and snowboarders can take as many runs through the course as possible within a set time limit, rather than on a fixed number of runs. Competitors are judged on their style, the difficulty of their tricks and overall execution. All of the athletes that competed were recruited through social media. While some were UM students, several traveled from Bozeman and even as far as Salt Lake City for the competition.
The rail features were provided by Blimp Snowboards. Other sponsors of the event including Associated Students of UM, Gull Ski, Lookout Pass, Disco Carrot, ON3P Skis, Line Skis and Monster Energy and Coca Cola.
After the competition concluded, skiers and snowboarders continued to slide rails and entertain the crowd during the bonfire and firework display.
“It’s surreal, that’s the only way I can put it,” Kempf said. “We put so much time and energy into figuring out all of the right ways to go about this, and it almost didn’t happen. Then, in the last two weeks, it all came together at once.
“The biggest thing I learned is that you can really pull it all together,” Lopeman said. “We were flying by the seat of our pants at the end, but we learned how to be flexible and adaptable and how to bring all of these different groups and companies together to pull something like this off.”
Launching a rail jam at UM was personal for Kempf. Originally from Bozeman, he had experienced similar events since he was 8-years-old. After coming to UM for college, he struggled to find that same sense of community that had been cultivated around those events in his hometown.
Rather than starting with the rail jam, Kempf instead created the UM Freeride Club. He set out to recruit the club’s founding members while passing out Red Bull energy drinks to other students on the Oval last spring semester.
“I started the club because I wanted friends that skied,” he said. “And skiing is really expensive, so how can we bring in people that maybe can’t afford it? So we’ve found ways to get our members discounted lift tickets through different partnerships or the equipment they need with used gear swaps.”
This weekend’s rail jam was a marker of success for the UM Freeride Club in terms of building community, and they also received community donations to support their group in the future, Kempf said.
“I got to hand out ski-related items and talk with little kids who were here for the basketball games but came out and saw this awesome event with these big kids doing cool things,” Kempf said. “That’s the most tangible result I saw – just some wide-eyed kids learning about something they’d never seen before and being absolutely stoked about it.
“It was really for the community,” Kempf continued. “But most importantly it was by the students and for the students. We’re really proud that we were able to pull this off.”
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Contact: Dave Kuntz, UM director of strategic communications, 406-243-5659, dave.kuntz@umontana.edu.