Savage Snowboarding at STRT JAM

Take the entire snowboarding industry and bottle them up for two years. Then watch as pent-up excitement gets unleashed all over the streets of Innsbruck, Austria for one weekend of unrestricted, loose AF carnage. The results are displays of some of the finest and most progressive snowboard rail wizardry available in the world right now, mixed with b-roll party footage and a whole heap of stoked snowboarders.

Now that the dust has settled, we can comfortably make the claim that Ethan Morgan’s inaugural STRT JAM will go down in the history books. Take a breath, exhale the gasoline fumes from kinked handrails coated in flames and very nearly human flesh, and rejoice in a riotous weekend well spent mashing up the streets. From tight lines threading the needle through architectural elements that 11 months out of each year nobody takes a second look at, to acid drops at Tivoli Stadion – a staple trick of any jam format event – it is safe to say people went for it.

“This is the start of something really huge. A place where snowboarders, media, and homies from all different backgrounds come together to create madness and thrive in each other’s creativity. I guess it’s been one of the best weekends of my life, I even proposed to my girlfriend during the event”, Alex Stewart told Whitelines.

“One of the highlights was getting the family back together. People flew in from everywhere. It really felt like a big reconnection for a lot of people, it felt like that energy was lost due to the obvious”, added photographer James North.

With support from a range of characters – Method Mag, Monster Energy, Bataleon & Switchback Bindings, not to mention a whole tonne of media, vagrants, dropouts, hometown heroes, and hanger-oners – the weekend brought the snowboarding industry back together again. None of this could have happened without the strong collaboration of the local Austrian authorities, as well as the hard work of the fine people at Method Magazine, who put on one hell of a show.

The Do-It-Yourself-Xtreme is the brainchild of German-born Ethan Morgan, aka Morgan Freeman, aka… the list of titles goes on. His concept brings together a bunch of snowboarders for a back-to-the-roots, build-it-yourself event that has grown from Alps-based spring jams into a progressive and frankly inspirational street-style event. He has proved that if you bring together the right people, magic happens. While Morgan has described the weekend as, understatedly, a “pilot”, it is difficult to imagine how the “real show” might be any different. It’s not as if any of the riders were holding back over the weekend.

“On the big rail, Zeb Powell did a huge hard way front two, gap to the down, which was next level. He also did a 50/50 to backflip off the kink. He was getting the crowd fired up”, said North.

During the build-up to the event, Morgan and his crew tried to keep their plans secret and avoided blowing the weekend out on social media. Since it happened though, STRT JAM has garnered some serious coverage on Instagram and in the mags. Monster Energy invited their whole global team to the event, some to ride, others to incite full-on send and the likes of Jamie Anderson, Zak Hale, Sage Kotsenberg, Sven Thorgren, Kevin Backstrom, Tor Lundstrom, Carlos Garcia Knight to name a few... were showing up for the guys and gals all weekend.

Speaking to Boardsport Source Chris McAlpine gave his hot take on the event.

“So many riders got creative on the spots and hit stuff that when we built the course, we didn’t even think of. Our winch broke on the first go so Alex Stewart ripped out his dirt bike, took the back tire off, and made a makeshift winch. That’s what the DIYX STRT JAM is all about.”

If as Morgan says this is a “pilot”, we wait with bated breath to see what he has in store for us next year. We’ll be needing a new winch.