Free Skiing In The Urban Ruins Of Industrial Russia

The concrete and steel scaffolding of cities has long provided a playground for skateboarders, parkourists, stunt cyclists, and now skiers.

The hardcore Finnish free-ski stylists of the group Nipwitz have stormed the urban landscapes of Northern and Eastern Europe and made them into an insane and fabulous laboratory for their particular brand of renegade sport.

Their most recent video shows a trip that they made to Russia’s Murmansk Oblast, a bizarre and contradictory universe of pristine mountains and industrial wasteland beyond the Arctic Circle.

“One of the first things we noticed here,” says one of the group in idiosyncratic English, “was the surreal contrast between the beautiful Arctic nature and the rottening cityscapes that have suffered from decades of neglection.” Some areas are so polluted that trees can no longer grow there.

In the remote city of Kandalaksha, the Nipwitz crew soars through windows of abandoned buildings, turns high concrete walls into half-pipes, slides down snow-packed staircases, survives an encounter with a knife-wielding man in an army uniform, and gives bored local teenagers something to talk about for many years to come.