When night falls in the mountains, Speed Rider Valentin Delluc wakes up. With 20m of LED lights under his wing, and a full moon to brighten up the Bossons glacier in Chamonix, France, Delluc sets out on an intense and poetic ride down the highline of the glacier.
image/text credit: Red Bull
The French speedrider charged down a steep line across a glacier at the foot of Europe’s highest mountain under the cover of darkness – find out how he pulled off the historic feat now.Valentin Delluc is a pioneering speedrider who’s flown down a French glacier at night to make his Moonline concept become a reality.
He spent seven months training for the feat which saw him tackle a challenging line in the dark across the rugged crevasses of the Bossons glacier at the foot of Mont Blanc.When the night of the flight proper came around, the snow cover wasn’t perfect and Delluc was concerned his LED lights mightn’t work properly.
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But the overall conditions were favourable and he received the green light to start at 4am. The flight saw him take off from the top of the Bossons Glacier, but he and his crew had a very short window of time to pull off the feat so the Moonline film was shot in just one take. This was a big challenge even for Delluc, who’s accustomed to speedriding through glaciers and over rooftops.Delluc found himself alone in the air at the start of the run and time seemed to stand still. But just four minutes and 20 seconds later he’d travelled over 1,500 vertical metres and achieved his dream of speedriding down a glacier at night.