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The Road

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Brandon Gust grew up skating the blacktop that snakes down from the Grand Targhee Ski Resort, and now he’s making a movie about it. Click on “More Photos” to read Gust’s production notes, and to watch a behind-the-scenes, check-out-the-flying-ranch-hand bonus clip.

Gust:

This is a trailer for a larger project. The general goal is to stoke up everybody on skateboarding (on the road), especially the newest (and future) generation of kids. The road was rerouted and repaved around 1999. That’s when I started skateboarding. My dad got me into it. He was one of the first guys to skateboard the road back in the seventies when they opened the resort. He thought I’d have fun doing it. So we built a skateboard together in our garage, and bought some wheels and trucks at the boardroom (on Pearl Street at the time) and gave it a go. I was scared shitless. After the first time I didn’t go back up there on my own for a couple more years. Then my friends got into it too, and it was more fun going out with the crew, just winging it, crashing all the time, figuring it out on our own. It was all about having a place with no rules, or any body telling us what, or how to do it.

Now the pavement is ten years old and there is some wear starting to show. Potholes are starting to form, cracks in the road, frost heaves. So it dawned on me that the road wasn’t always going to be perfect for skateboarding like I had always known it to be. So bringing me back to the goal – stoking everyone out on skateboarding this road.

I thought skateboarding on the road might fade away if the road fell apart. There was also talk of chip-sealing the road- an instant skater stopper. So I felt I should start documenting how damn much fun we were having up here, to try and keep skating alive on the road. There is also new management at the resort. A new housing development at the resort is in the works. I thought skateboarding may become illegal due to liability, like it has on many other roads. So I wanted to make something that would stoke people up enough to go up there even if it’s illegal (hopefully never) like on the pass.

I want this to be a documentary as well. I want to get the history of the road, from the old hippies’ side, and from the young kids’ side. I have heard a lot of wild stories from my dad and his old hippie friends. There have been a lot of crazy times on that road and I feel it is part of my duty, as a storyteller, to share some of these tales.

But documentaries put people to sleep, I thought. We gotta make this heart pounding, edge-of-your-seat kind of shit. So I started playing around with the cable rig. Trying to get original shots that displayed the road and the skaters. Set up eleven cables this summer. Most of the time I did the rigging myself so I could be ready when the crew showed up. Pretty happy about the shots I came out with. I learned a lot about how to make it better too. And really, I was just trying to get the cable rig dialed for winter time to shoot skiing and snowboarding. I figured I might as well figure it out in the summer when my fingers are not frozen. So I accomplished that goal too.

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Rain skating: it’s a sport unto itself. Gust is currently cutting a new trailer, which will be unveiled before Magic Moments, the new Jackson Hole soul-ski epic from Darrell Miller. Don’t miss the premiere, on November 13 at Snow King.

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