Gadling

Here at Gadling, our inboxes are full of pitches on the fabulous skiing conditions in Colorado and Utah, but news about the latest lifts and bases rarely sparks our interest. You know what does? Setting up an obstacle course in an abandoned building. That does.

To create the video above, Logan Imlach and Matt Wild spent six days constructing and skiing a line through the infamous Buckner Building in Whittier, Alaska. Once Alaska’s largest building, during its heyday in the 1950s the Buckner Building was called a “city under one roof.” It housed 1,000 apartments, plus a movie theater, bowling alley, pool, gym and shops. The building was seriously damaged in the 1964 Alaska earthquake, which rang a 9.2 on the Richter magnitude scale. Today, it’s just a large, abandoned government building, ripe for some creative folks like Imlach and Wild to make their snowy playground.

Although there is a potentially dangerous amount of asbestos in the five-story building – not to mention its questionable structural integrity – the Buckner Building has become somewhat of a landmark for local kids and tourists in Whittier. We’re not saying we recommend building an obstacle course of your own inside the building, but we sure are glad someone did.