The Dark Horse Invitational wrapped up on Friday afternoon with a jam session on the new Pro Line Casey Brown designed for her inaugural event, held at her home hill, Revelstoke Mountain Resort. A local crowd lined the course to cheer the ladies on, as they dropped from a wooden ramp into a 13-foot freefall to the dirt below, then continued through a huge step-up to a stepdown then a straight-air jump.

It was a day of ups and downs, with four of the women crashing, resulting in varying levels of injury. Bailey Goldstone ended up in the hospital with a broken wrist and a broken collarbone, after crashing off the first drop. Tayte Proulx-Royds, the 12-year-old phenom blowing minds with a level of skill and commitment befitting a rider much older, crashed on the second jump, the soaring step-up, which she’d been hitting all week. Sarah Walter broke her scapula after a crash on her tailbone, and Brown also went down on her second lap when she went deep on the last jump, but walked away without serious injury.

Despite those few downs, it was simultaneously a day of party trains, progression and encouragement as the women tried new tricks on the dirts and in the air bag/mulch zone, towed each other into big hits, then cheered one another on as they leveled up. That’s exactly the spirit Brown envisioned when she brainstormed Dark Horse—a competition-free week where both up-and-coming and established freeriders could progress their skills on a consequential, big-hit course but without the pressure of landing on a podium.

Hannah Bergemann—who has her own event coming up, Hang Time, in Bellingham—C.J. Selig, Georgia Astle, Camila Nogueira, Jordy Scott, Natasha Miller, Micayla Gatto, Lucy Van Eestern and Lily Boucher continued rolling the line throughout the day, and the Dark Horse finale put an exclamation point on the week with an awards ceremon, where Proulx-Royds took home the Dark Horse trophy, Goldstone won the Let’er Buck award and Miller won the Wild Jane for best trick.

Photography by Robin Oneill.

Bailey Goldstone atop the first drop.