Dirt Delirium

Digging at Red Bull Rampage is one of the greatest overlooked feats in sports. And Justin Wyper and Evan Young are two of the best to ever do it. 

Individually, they have dug a combined 19 times for Brandon Semenuk, helping him win four of his five Rampage titles. Last year, they won the long-coveted Digger Award as the best dig team at the event. Over the years they’ve developed a sixth sense of what needs to be done in the short time allotted to shape a sheer mountainside somewhere outside Virgin, Utah. They’ve become a well oiled machine, capable of near-telepathic communication for the work that needs to be done — where to chisel, fortify and mold.

And yet, year after year, the work never gets easier.

“Rampage is one of those events where you’re excited going into it, and then during the week, it’s the worst week of your life, and you’re like, ‘I’m never doing this again, this is terrible,”‘ Wyper says. “But then afterwards, you look back and you’re like, ‘That was actually really fun, and I enjoyed myself, and I would definitely do it again.’ It’s like Hell Week in the military, where you’ve never worked so hard, and it’s grueling.”

The rules of Rampage are simple: Each rider is allotted two diggers, and each team has a grand total of eight days to build a line that can get the rider from the starting gate to the finish corral. Except for the still-standing lines and features from previous years, the competition site is untouched. Dig teams are quite literally moving mountains.

Four of the dig days are solely dedicated to digging — no riding allowed — which means riders will pitch in as well. During the remaining four days, riders are allowed on their bikes to test features. They still dig, but they leave their two diggers to do the lion’s share of work, continuing to build out the line while also reshaping what they’ve already done.

Young’s first Rampage with Semenuk was 2012. The crew called the week before the event “Man Camp”: A test of strength and endurance in the desert heat.

“It was like, ‘You’re working hard, you’re dedicated, you’re here. Let’s just get through it, and make this happen,”‘ Young says. “It was eye opening, but so addictive at that point. I knew I wanted to go back however many times Brandon wanted to go back.”

Both Young and Wyper met Semenuk through chance interactions. For Young, it was 2010 when friends invited him to watch Semenuk and the late Stevie Smith film parts for the legendary mountain bike film, “Follow Me.” Later, Semenuk moved to the West Coast and Young started hanging out with him more frequently. Semenuk asked Young to help him build for his documentary series “Life Behind Bars,” and the rest is history.

Wyper grew up outside Vancouver, and he and Semenuk frequently saw each other riding around Whistler and at competitions. Their friendship has only grown over time. But though Wyper has known Semenuk longer than Young, he didn’t do his first Rampage dig until 2015. The year before, he was building for Red Bull Joy Ride in Whistler, and he reached out to Semenuk for feedback on some of his courses. Their working relationship blossomed from there.

Wyper, Young and Semenuk are very much working in collaboration throughout the week in Utah. Semenuk’s planning for Rampage begins two months or more in advance, and he will give his diggers a general idea of how he’d like to get down the mountain. The build begins from that foundation, but as dirt gets moved, new ideas and opportunities spring to mind. Young and Wyper know Semenuk so well, they’ll pitch him ideas on tricks and features. Sometimes, Semenuk finds a way to execute even their wildest flights of fancy.

“A lot of the time, I’ll think of video game tricks and runs and be like, almost jokingly, ‘What about this, man?’ And he’ll be like, ‘Actually, that’s not a bad idea,'” Young says. “It blows me away. It’s kind of gotten to the point where every project I’m throwing out a couple odd ones where it’s like, ‘Oh, what about doing this crazy manual thing?’ And you never know, sometimes it catches.”

Wyper and Young have a symbiotic relationship. Wyper is a skilled freerider himself (he participated in this year’s whip-off at Crankworx Whistler), and Young is a longtime trail builder who lives near Semenuk and is frequently building for him on video projects. One sees trails from a trick perspective, the other from a feature perspective, and together they’re able to inform Semenuk’s line while also seeing possibilities that even he may have missed in his planning and scouting.

But building is only one part of the equation. Camaraderie plays an outsized role at Rampage. As a digger, not only do you have to work efficiently with the people you’ll be spending nearly every waking minute alongside in a desert, but humor, patience and genuine friendship are crucial for competition day performance, too. A big part of Young and Wyper’s job is making sure Semenuk doesn’t overexert himself ahead of the all-important day.

“There’s times when you’re like, ‘OK Brandon, calm down. You don’t need to rake that pile of rocks.’ Or, ‘You don’t need to chisel at this wall. Let us do that,'” Young says. “Like, I don’t mind going home after 12 hours and being completely exhausted. I want you to go home and rest up the body, have a good mindset, and be in a good place. Feel good, because it’s only gonna show down the line.”

In addition to exhausting themselves physically, Rampage diggers are also gambling with time. When Semenuk rode a single-crown fork at Rampage and won his fourth title in 2021, the signature trick was a flat drop tail whip — a Rampage first. Both the drop and the landing didn’t exist before Wyper and Young got to work on it. They had to build a 30-foot retaining wall into a cliff, which ate up over three days of work by itself, nearly half of their allotted time. If they had sustained any setbacks, they would have been scrambling late to finish the build, or been forced to change the line.

No build goes perfectly smoothly. The workplace is a wide open desert, exposed from all angles to wind and sun and whatever else the conditions may blow in, not to mention the fickle nature of the slab of rock they’re on. As good as Young and Wyper are, they’re no match against the unpredictability and strength of Mother Nature. 

One of Wyper’s favorite builds ever was for Semenuk’s 2019 Rampage win. He and Young “looked at the hillside a little bit differently than everybody else” that year. “Lots of people rode ridges, and we went down through the guts. We had this cool little sharkfin step-down into a little caddy-style lip, step-down into this big 55-foot double mid-course.” 

The build was even more impressive considering that the lip of the jump collapsed during the middle of the week, costing the team nearly two days of work.

“Evan and I just kind of looked at each other, didn’t even say anything, kind of sat down for five minutes, and just were silent,” Wyper says. “And then without even saying anything, we both got up and started rebuilding it, and ended up getting it done. That was a pretty devastating moment for us, for sure.”

Nothing challenged the team like 2022, however. Semenuk is not only a prodigious mountain bike talent, he’s also one of the fastest American rally car racers. And that year, he found himself in the enviable, but challenging, position of being able to win the American Rally Association championship the weekend before the biggest freeride mountain bike event in the world.

To even attempt such a feat meant round-the-clock planning, practice and preparation on Semenuk’s part. It also meant he would miss the first four dedicated dig days for the rally event in Marquette, Mich. Wyper and Young were on their own, working to complete a Rampage-worthy line with 33 percent less manpower. Semenuk won the rally title, then took a red-eye flight to get to Utah in time to join Day 5 of the build, forgoing one of his few precious riding opportunities to pitch in with a shovel.

Semenuk knew he was asking a lot of friends by leaving them to do six hands worth of work with four. But Young and Wyper were enthusiastic about taking on the challenge, and encouraged Semenuk to pull off the double. (If you haven’t watched “Balancing Act,” Semenuk’s documentary about the weekend, you should do so as soon as you’ve finished reading this story.)

“I can’t thank those guys enough for what they did,” Semenuk said after the event. “They were honestly a big part of the decision in going to the event. It felt like I was putting a lot of stress on other people, and they didn’t deserve that. So I was like, ‘You know what, I don’t need to do the event. I’m OK without it. I don’t want to put that on you guys.’ And they were like, ‘No, no, no, we’re down. Let’s do it.’”

The team accomplished everything they set out to do, including a drop out of the start gate. Semenuk’s acid drop was named Best Trick, and he took third place overall that year. Semenuk would have liked to have won, of course, but if he was disappointed in anything, it was the fact that Young and Wyper weren’t given the Digger Award for their efforts.

“Obviously I’m biased, but I have a hard time believing they weren’t the best diggers of that event,” Semenuk said. “Especially looking at their track record the last 10 years, the craziest builds we’ve done, it blows my mind that they haven’t gotten that award. And absolutely in my heart, they won that, hands down.”

Wyper called the start of the 2022 Rampage week “four of the hardest days that Evan and I have probably ever worked.”

“We were fortunate enough that we had some people on the hill that were kind enough to bring us lunches so we didn’t have to go down and get them and waste time doing that,” Wyper says. “But it was pretty grueling, that’s for sure [laughs].”

They received justice in 2024, when Semenuk won a historic fifth Rampage, and Young and Wyper brought home the long deserved Digger Award. Ironically, according to Young, the build was relatively stress free compared to past editions, which may be a testament to how well the team functions after a decade-plus of digging. They tackled the hardest features in the early days when they had the most stamina, and had enough time and energy left late in the week to help out other dig teams by picking up trash, or giving them unused sandbags. “We went home early on the final day of practice,” Young says. “I’ve never done that before.”

Young and Wyper’s longevity with Semenuk can’t be overstated. Some Rampage riders seem to change diggers every year, but Semenuk pulls from a tight inner circle for all of his endeavors, whether it’s a competition or a video edit. He likes to work with his friends, and actively forges an atmosphere of creativity and collaboration. He may be a singularly talented athlete with a singularly outrageous work ethic, but he also understands better than anyone that no one does their best work alone. 

And working with your friends is just more fun. Inside jokes and killer music are such an important part of the week that Semenuk dedicated a paint scheme to the nonsense that he, Wyper and Young have said to each other after hours of breaking their bodies and baking their brains in the desert.

“We’re just trying to have the most fun on the hill,” Young says. “That’s all we’re gonna do. We let the dirt delirium take us over. Things get a little weird out there, but you just learn to accept it, because it’s gonna happen whether you want it to happen or not.”

Frequently during digs, teams encounter obstacles that seem impossible to overcome. And yet somehow, Young and Wyper have never failed to deliver. To hear them describe the job, they’re simply vibing off one another.

“It just happens,” Young says. “It’ll be like, ‘We’re moving on, grab this tool, start stacking this up.’ We do this, we do that. All of a sudden, bingo bango, you got a jump.”

Wyper and Young are grateful that they wound up in Semenuk’s orbit. They’ve made a career that many amateur mountain bikers only dream of. But ask Semenuk, and he’s just as grateful to have found people who are as overwhelmingly passionate as he is, and who can dream as big as he does. 

They make moving mountains sound easy. It’s not. Digging at Rampage is exactly as brutal and awe-inspiring as it sounds, and worth every drop of sweat for a taste of immortality. 

“I keep going back because it’s a part of mountain bike history,” Wyper says. “A lot of this stuff, it’ll be around forever, and Brandon will be looked back on as he’s an innovator and a leader in the sport. Just to be able to have a little fingerprint in that is really cool.”