The Ultimate Step-Down Kicker

Does a cliff drop count as a ‘kicker’? Well, it does when DCP goes and builds a cheese wedge on the top!

Most of the jumps covered in this article are about boosting high out of the lip, or travelling crazy distances. So far, only the Baker and Avoriaz road gaps have featured a raised take-off – using gravity rather than fighting it. That is, until this one.

The cover of the 2003 Kingpin movie Shakedown pictured French-Canadian ripper David Carrier-Porcheron (DCP) launching off an impossibly high cliff. Does a cliff drop count as a ‘kicker’, I hear you ask? Well, it does when DCP goes and builds a cheese wedge on the top! And it most certainly changed what was deemed possible on a snowboard. It wasn’t just the height of the thing, either (though at a solid 80 feet, that is impressive enough). No, what was even more special about the jump was that unlike your average balls-out cliff jumps, DCP was throwing technical spins off it.

The cliff is located in Sonora Pass, Tahoe, and despite the name it wasn’t actually DCP who hit it first.

“Alex Auchu lost ro-sham-bo [scissors-paper-stone] and he had to go first,” explains DCP. “He straight aired, kinda nose dove and said ‘I’m done with it.’ So that made it even scarier! It’s just really big, and actually not so steep – plus the snow was a bit wind-blown. But it was quite an adrenaline rush.”

After that first attempt, DCP returned with Andreas Wiig and added the gnarly kicker to the take-off. Wiig arguably claimed the cliff for his own with, amongst other tricks, an insane inverted rodeo.

“Every time you have to step it up and do something better,” says DCP. “Andreas killed it and shut it down for sure. It’s still crazy to be standing on top of it waiting for the sun to rise.”