Winter Streets Taken Up By Urban Skiing

City centers are surely not the first places that pop into your mind when somebody mentions skiing. However, for urban skiers Cam Riley and Clayton Villa, high city buildings, street lamp posts and sidewalk railings are more of a challenge than an obstacle. In fact, those exact places are sought for because they offer the ideal playground for performing their unbelievable stunts and tricks.

Cam and Clayton are famous for flying over lampposts, sliding down rails and leaping off buildings as they are sweeping through a city. The high-risk winter sport they are practicing is a mixture of extreme skiing, skateboarding and parkour – and involves breathtaking jumps and tricks in an urban setting. Cam Riley and Clayton Vila are two of the top urban skiers in the world, specializing in risky stunts on the snow. Both athletes have been pushing the limits of extreme skiing by transforming car parks, alleyways and flyovers into urban-ski-playgrounds.

They can be seen performing on a regular basis on the streets of Boulder, Boston, Chicago, Duluth and Maine in the US and have recently released a documentary movie about their feats featuring the adventurer Bear Grylls as presenter. In order to provide space for their sport, these relentless winter parkour artists have been transforming parking lots, flyovers and alleyways and flyovers into playgrounds for urban skiing, pushing the limit of this sport with every consecutive feat.

And they are not the only ones. Urban skiing is definitely on the rise, seeing more and more urban daredevils who provoke the police by skidding down rails, waiting for public venues to close and emerging only under the cover of darkness only to get an adrenaline dose out of this sport.