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With one short edit, Jordie Lunn blew our minds and revived backwoods freeride
“What the actual f**k?!” sums up the collective reaction when all of us here in the MBUK office crowded around the same computer to watch Jordie Lunn’s Rough AF 3 web edit. These days, we’re so overloaded with mountain bike media that it’s easy to zone out, but when a guy with Jordie’s reputation builds a sheer vertical roll-in that’s taller than a house and requires him to winch his bike to the top with a rope, he’s got our full attention!
Jordie Lunn is a name you may remember from back in the day, when he starred in The Collective’s classic freeride flick Roam, (2006) but in the past few years, he’s dropped off our radars, in the UK at least. The burly, tattooed Canadian never really went away though, he just disappeared into the woods
and set about building the most creative, boundary-pushing lines he could think of.
“My goal with the Rough AF series has always just been to push myself,” Jordie tells us. “And I love everything about it, from scouting new zones to finding features, building them, trying them for the first time, making adjustments and eventually having unique lines to session.” Nearly everything you see in the videos is completely hand built and involves “a ton of hiking around in the bush”. “Plus,” says Jordie, “Things never turn out quite how you pictured them, but I love that weirdness!”
Rough AF 3 is crazy from start to finish, with huge step-downs to gaps and even a ladder bridge quarter pipe. The standout feature for us has to be the tree-ride roll-in though, which, unsurprisingly, was super-sketchy to build. “I made my way up slat by slat, but I was on the edge of falling off backwards every time I started a nail, “Jordie tells us. “The top platform was tricky too and it took me a while before I even wanted to go sit up there with tools!”
“I backed out of riding it first time too,” he admits. “We were all set up to film and I was on my bike at the top, but I just didn’t feel comfortable. I took some time though, made some adjustments and did it the second time.”
The tree ride may have been the feature that kept Jordie up at night, but the big 720-degree spin was the trick he slammed the hardest on. “I first tried it almost a year ago,” he explains. “We had the whole edit finished except for that clip, but I wanted to wait until after [Red Bull] Rampage to try it again. I crashed hard that second time too, so I built a new step-down to get the final shot and luckily that one worked out perfectly.”
Jordie finishes by saying that he, Calvin Huth (the filmmaker) and the other guys involved in the project are already throwing ideas around for a feature-length version of Rough AF. “Bring back the full freeride vid!” he says. Now that’s something we’re excited to see!