Dan Brisse made his name jumping between buildings. In GoPro’s short film Urban Snowboarding with Dan Brisse, the Minnesota rider launches off one snowy rooftop, flies across the gap and lands on the next, with the street far below.
Who is Dan Brisse?
Brisse was born in December 1983 and comes from Cold Spring, Minnesota, a state that has produced a remarkable number of top street snowboarders. His management agency, Superheroes, lists a long record:
- X Games Real Snow: gold in 2011 and 2012, silver in 2013 and 2014.
- Awards: runner-up for Transworld Snowboarding’s Snowboarder of the Year in 2011, and named among Snowboarder Magazine’s “10 Best Riders of Earth” the same year.
- Video parts: closing segments in Absinthe Films’ Nowhere (2010), CAPiTA’s Defenders of Awesome (2011) and Volcom’s IP2 (2012), plus a signature board with Volcom and CAPiTA.
Volcom’s Billy Anderson nicknamed him “Blue-Collar Brisse”, because he builds many of his own setups out of snow, wood, metal and bolts, including wall rides and a parking-garage gap.
The rooftop gap that changed street snowboarding
According to Snowboard Magazine, a roof gap near the end of Brisse’s part in Absinthe’s 2009 film Neverland helped start a new style of street riding built on speed, height and high consequences. Whitelines describes him as the rider behind “monstrously-sized building gaps”.
The GoPro film shows exactly that. With no hill to build speed, the rider has to find it somewhere else, and urban crews use winches, bungee ropes and tow-ins to pull them up to speed before the take-off. The rooftop edges and walls give the camera hard lines, so you can see the size of the gap and the drop beneath it at a glance.
Video: GoPro: Urban Snowboarding with Dan Brisse (published by GoPro).
Winching the Midwest with a GoPro
Brisse and GoPro worked together more than once. In May 2015 GoPro released Winching the Midwest, an edit from a year of filming for his X Games Real Snow part, shot entirely on the GoPro HERO3+. It follows him across the snowy cities of the Midwest, towed into rails, walls and gaps by a high-powered winch.
The Midwest suits this kind of riding. Cities like Minneapolis get reliable snow and cold winters but no big mountains nearby, so riders turned to handrails, ledges and rooftops. Real Snow, the X Games contest Brisse won twice, is judged entirely on filmed street and backcountry video parts.
Urban snowboarding is a professional’s game
Street riding like this comes with a crew, a careful plan and riders with years of experience. Falls happen onto concrete, not soft snow, which is why British magazine Whitelines once called the evolution of street riding a shift from “an unpleasant tumble down some concrete steps” to “a high speed splat into a concrete wall”. Enjoy it on screen and save your own jumps for the terrain park.
Explore more: an evidence-based look at resort snowboarding and how height is conveyed in photographs.
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