With winter snows a distance memory, we thought it might be good time to bring back some of the best videos from last snowmobiling season—videos like X-Games champ Levi LaVallee’s urban jaunt through one of the Twin Cities.
Some people see the world as one big playground where anything and everything is an obstacle and/or opportunity to be conquered. People like snowmobiler and X Games legend Levi LaVallee obviously thrives on such a challenge. This past winter LaVallee and his Red Bull video crew ripped up the street of Saint Paul, in what is one of the most spectacular shoots of urban sledding ever.
Levi LaVallee spoke of his experience navigating the streets of Saint Paul, Minnesota (his hometown) with the same exuberance as when he had imagined it as a kid. "As a kid, you’re always looking at things like ‘Oh, I could probably jump that,’ when you’re driving through a city,” said Levi LaVallee. “To be able to actually go do that was like a fairy tale.”
The video was a project that LaVallee and crew had been hoping to bring to life for years, and with the help of the city’s authorities, it became a possibility: “Saint Paul was awesome. They were super supportive of the project, and all of the people helping us out – the police and everyone blocking the roads – were amazing. The whole project went really smooth.”
Running a high performance snowmobile on the streets and in an urban setting was new territory for all involved. LaVallee spoke of the special tricks the team took to make the sled more road-friendly: “We had a lot of really cool mods on the snowmobile – we had a sled with wheel skis so that I could turn on asphalt and manoeuvre the hard surfaces better.”
So what was his favourite section? The one where he got to do the most jumps, of course: “The Harriet Island section, we shot that whole thing straight through one time, just to do it, and it was incredible.
It wasn't all great times, though. LaVallee admitted that there were several jumps that had him nervous. "There were quite a few different ones that had me questioning myself. There was quite a few high risk jumps out there. One that I was really nervous about to begin with was the bridge drop. That was scary, until I actually did it, then I realised it wasn’t so bad."
"There’s no room for error; if you don’t make it over that hole, that’s obviously life and death," he added.
