IMMORTALIZING THE EPHEMERAL

It starts with a line, or a single movement. Drawing from all that he has already done, his past successes and failures, the artist takes this seed, this line, this movement, and begins to build. For weeks he sculpts soil into towering buttes, smoothing transitions from wall to ground, linking together obstacles that are so improbable as to not even be considered to the outside eye. He works with a dedicated crew. Every day, they are there soon after sunrise. Every day, they work relentlessly until dark. Even with the assistance of machinery, the digging is brutal. Heavy mud in winter, rock and baked clay in summer.

The sculpted trail begins to emerge, pulled from the artist’s mind into existence by the combined effort of the crew. They have dug his vision out of blank soil into a gravity fed sculpture that is both beautiful and terrifying. The artist trades his shovel for a bike, and proceeds to ride with a style and authority that very few humans can ever hope to emulate. Photos are taken, videos made. And then, in spite of the backbreaking labor that went into building this massive kinetic playground, it is over. The soil is plowed back to nothing, as if the artist and his crew had never been there at all. The only evidence of their work exists in a two-minutelong video and a few photographic gigabytes.

This is Brandon Semenuk’s world. He has been pushing the evolution of his own riding since childhood. After rising to a dominant