Charleston, South Carolina: a filming location for the Netflix show Outer Banks, the home of musician Darius Rucker, and the site for one of the hottest snowboarding rail jams in the southeast.
No, that last one isn’t a joke.
The Mex 1 restaurant is hosting a rail jam at the Firefly Distillery Saturday evening.
The event was born from marketing and beverage director Morgan Hurley’s love for boardsports. Hurley grew up in Charleston surfing and skateboarding, but his father was a big skier. As a youth, he and his siblings would take trips to the mountains to snowboard.
Fast forward to 2017: Hurley and the Mex1 team was looking for a way to celebrate the restaurant’s anniversary. He knew a few guys doing smaller snowboarding rail jams nearby with ice from local hockey rinks, and so he pitched the idea to the restaurant owners.
There was a wakeboarding park in the area called Trophy Lakes that has since shut down after the Covid-9 pandemic. With a lot of surfers and skateboarders in the region, and the mountains of North Carolina just about four hours away, it wasn’t hard to draw competitors. The first few iterations of the rail jam had a smaller crew of participants between eight and 12 guys.
“They were just really willing to huck it, you know what I mean?” Hurley said. “Just attempt a backflip or go further. You know, we had a couple of guys who knew how to tease it out, and get a 270 to tap out, or doing something along those lines, but realistically it was the guys that were throwing the front flips that were getting the crowd hyped up in the beginning."
Of course, the question everyone is asking is how the heck does the crew get snow in South Carolina? Even with an arctic blast hitting the East Coast, snow is a rarity, and it’s mighty difficult to get enough to schedule a rail jam months in advance.
Related: Sam Anderson and Sinister Films Crew Featured on Kansas City TV News
The answer: Thousands of pounds of ice.
“So, it’s literally like two guys on the truck, just cutting bags of ice and throwing into basically a retrofitted wood chipper. And then it’s just those guys spraying the snow wherever we tell him to spray it,” Hurley said.
Blowing Rock, North Carolina, native Luke Winkelmann will be on hand to judge the competition. Hurley was hoping that he’d be down to compete, but Winkelmann is recovering from an injury he sustained earlier in the season. JP Pardy, the owner of the Recess board shop in Boone, North Carolina, will be on hand, and Hurley said that he plans to bring a crew of riders as well, like Abby Wall and Jack Goodman. Pro wakeboarder Wesley Mark Jacobsen will compete, along with wakeboarders Ralphy Dalton and Todd Allen.
The event will be held at the Firefly Distillery. In the past, the event has seen between 1,000 and 1,500 spectators, and was held at the Mex1 restaurant. But there’s also been a demand for a larger venue, and by moving it to the distillery, the capacity is upped to about 4,000 spectators. Hurley hopes that will give the event the space it needs to grow in the future.
“We’re really trying to make this something that is a name for itself every year,” he said. "Where riders are looking forward to coming down for it, and everything like that.”