Antti and I were finishing the long winter season in Ruka, in mid-April. It’s quite rare that the resorts in northern Finland still have enough snow to ride at that time of the year, but we were both super motivated to get some shots, so we decided to try. We stayed in one of our friend’s caravans for a week and rode the resorts almost all by ourselves. The weather is usually sunny in April, but it rained nearly the whole time. But that didn’t bother us — we did this log ride and a couple other jibs, and hit the big kicker.
For this shot, we built a small kicker in front of this old, dead tree. First, it looked like it wasn’t going to work, and Antti almost gave up, which is not normal for him. I started to shoot it from the ground, but I didn’t like how it looked; I went to look for a ladder and found one tall enough to climb up the tree, so I shot the photo looking down on Antti. When I got this shot, I told Antti he didn’t need to push it anymore if he didn’t want to, but he still wanted to try a couple more runs.
The next day, we had a great session on the kicker. It was the most fun and productive week of my whole season — and it ended up with a good party in Antti’s hometown of Rovaniemi.