A young man stands on the edge of a roof, looks down at a street buried in fresh snow, and jumps. The clip went round the world in September 2013, when HuffPost shared it under a headline that summed up the internet's reaction: in Russia, after a big snowfall, this is simply what you do.
The rooftop snow jump that went viral
The video was short and simple. The camera showed the drop from the roof first, so the viewer felt the height, then followed the jump into the drift below. Most of the suspense came from that pause at the edge, when the white surface below looked soft, smooth and endless.
Snow jumping clips like this have become a recurring winter genre on Russian social media. Every heavy snowfall seems to produce a new wave of people leaping from garages, balconies and roofs into the deepest drift they can find.
From one clip to the #всугробchallenge
The craze got a name in early 2018. In Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, in Russia's Far East, teenager and blogger Artem Makovsky posted an Instagram video of himself jumping into a snowbank. It launched the hashtag #всугробchallenge, roughly "into the snowdrift challenge", and by February 2018 young people across Russia were filming themselves diving into drifts, often in nothing but their underwear.
Kamchatka remains the heartland of the trend. When heavy storms bury the peninsula's towns, locals jump out of windows and off roofs into the piles. A fresh round of such videos appeared in January 2026, when deep snow again covered the region.
What can hide under a snowdrift
The appeal of a drift is that it erases everything beneath it. That is also its danger. Russian emergency services have repeatedly urged people not to copy these stunts, pointing to hazards that snow hides completely: fences, parked cars, garden furniture and exposed steel rebar on building sites.
Snow itself varies enormously. Fresh powder can be fluffy and deep, while a drift that has thawed and refrozen may be dense and hard just below a soft top layer. A jumper who lands in deep, light snow can also sink in up to the neck and be unable to climb out without help.
Better ways to enjoy deep snow
Leave the roof jumps to the internet: falls from roofs and balconies are a real cause of serious winter injuries. If you have deep powder at home, a jump from a low bank into snow you have checked with a pole, with a friend watching, gives most of the fun at a fraction of the risk. For more snow that behaves in surprising ways, see snow moving off a cabin roof and a drift blocking a Newfoundland doorway.
Related reading
- A Snow-Loaded Building Collapses: What the Video Actually Shows
- Snow Swimming: A Winter Stunt Meets a Different Material
- Catch the Ice Dude: A Pool Jump Meets a Frozen Surface
- Apetor’s Norwegian Winter Films: Comedy in an Icy Setting
- A Dive into Deep Snow in Northern Italy
Sources
- The Moscow Times: Russians dive into snow in viral flashmob (2018)
- Kursiv: Kamchatka residents leap into massive snowdrifts (2026)
- Video featured by HuffPost on 4 September 2013.
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