Video & Photo Epic: Freeride Steps Forward at Hangtime in Bellingham

The whispers around women's freeride hitting its heyday in Bellingham right now might be true.

The Hangtime jump jam is no joke. Now having just finished its third year, the event was started in 2021 by Hannah Bergemann, who lives in Bellingham and has been carving out her niche as a leader in the women's freeride space.

Hannah attended Red Bull Formation in 2019, the first of its kind - an invitational event where the top female freeriders spent a week digging and riding in the desert with the aim of raising the bar for the sport, redefining what each of them could do in order to lead the rest of mountain biking in that direction. Formation seems to have jump-started progression worldwide, with several events - including Hangtime - I think realizing there was space for them to exist. We're lucky to be watching it unfold.

There's a piece I haven't yet figured out how to include in discussions of Hangtime, and that is that it's the event where I sustained my severe traumatic brain injury. The injury has been very life-changing, so of course returning to the event included some extremely mixed emotions, but I'm choosing to set that aside for most of my discussion of the event. I think an injury like that warrants mentioning, and is a good reminder that we need to weigh the risks we're taking against our confidence that they're the right risks and whatever we're looking to gain from succeeding. But beyond that, I'd prefer to focus not on my vague ideas about myself, but on the riding that just happened right in front of me.

The event happened over two days, a Friday and a Saturday, with Sunday held on standby as a weather day. The first three sessions, Friday and Saturday morning, the event tried to minimize the pressure riders would face, keeping the event non-competitive and fun, without real pressure to hit anything at all. There's a new trick jump at the bottom of the course, a relatively small lip built next to the last jump that the riders used to warm up. They then towed each other through the jumps, some riders hitting the full line right away, others working through the jumps one by one, building from the filter step-down to the next two shark fins to the hip then the big floaty jumps.

By the time the final evening expo rolled around, several of the riders had made it farther in the line than they expected - through the whole thing, for many of them - and were ready to throw down in front of a crowd. The energy was infectious, the riders keeping each others' moods ready for the challenge.

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Racing and Events Videos Hangtime PBWMN