If the ski mountains are your winter playground, then the terrain parks are the jungle gym. Freestyle skiing and snowboarding is a sport filled with stunts, jumps, and tricks many wouldn’t dare to attempt. As the riders take risk and ride with adrenaline in their veins. Its exciting and mesmerizing to watch the twist, turns and aerial dismounts all over the mountainside playground.

Terrain Park Builders at the mountains head out each week to rearrange boxes, rails, pipes and new features for riders to explore and you. With the routes and elements everchanging it keeps the park skiers coming back night after night. Terrain parks have continued to grow in popularity and magnitude that alongside the crowds of recreation riders, many athletes use them as training venues to practice for competition.

Jonathan Schmidt is the head coach of two freestyle programs here in the Twin Ports and the availability of local terrain parks with lights and rope tows has been a huge benefit to him for running efficient practices where athletes can have countless hits on features and many reps through the park each night. As his programs exponentially grow with talented athletes, the Northland continues to represent on larger stages of freestyle skiing, “Duluth is becoming a huge rock star in Minnesota here where we bring a massive amount of riders to competitions and it’s just unreal in Minnesota”.

The culture around freestyle goes beyond the desire to sweep the podium, as the community continues to grow between competition and recreational riders. “I would say it’s more so the atmosphere. Like just being around a bunch of kids that love to do the thing that you want to do is just, there’s just like this big huge gigantic bubble of passion that is created from these kids like all being surrounded by each other, all pushing each other that little bit. They’re all out here for a reason. They have passion for the freestyle industry.”