- Colin Wiseman
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- bikemag.com
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- August 21, 2025
When Talus Turk first visited The Lookout, he didn’t intend to create Woolley Fest. Rather, he was just looking for somewhere to build a really big jump.
“In April of 2024, I’d just broken my collarbone and I couldn’t get it out of my head—I wanted a safely built 65-or-70-foot jump that I could hit over and over, to train and maybe film,” says the young rider, already a veteran of two Red Bull Rampages. “Scotty [Scamehorn] from the Shire introduced me to Zack [Goodwin] at The Lookout, and he was like, ‘We can bring the machine in, build a line here—I just want to sit in my lawn chair and watch people fly through the air.’”
Talus Turk drying out the road gap woodwork at sunrise.
Goodwin, who had grown up watching riders like Wade Simmons film freeride near The Lookout in the early 2000s, had always dreamed of having his own trails up there. A few years back, he bought it. He then hired the Shire Built crew to create a handful of trails. And when Talus came through the Skagit Valley dream spot, he knew he’d found what he was looking for—a steep hillside above Clear Lake with views westward to the Olympic Mountains with space to create.
Road gap analog: scoping before launching (left). Dustin Rehagen of Treelines NW making a few final tweaks (right).
At the time, Talus was living with fellow freeride athlete Ryan McNulty down in Utah. The two were just getting started on Hesh’s “Bring The Pain,” an independent mountain bike film releasing this fall. Turk and McNulty are just 23 years old, but the duo has a big vision. The film follows them, Hayden Zablotny, Torsenn Brown, and friends around the world and features a segment from each of their hometowns.
What is now Woolley Fest made sense for Talus and Ryan. They both tapped heavily into their personal media budget to cover costs as best they could, and Shire Built did the machine work “for pennies on the dollar, because they want this, too” according to Talus. Dustin Rehagen of Treelines NW did the woodwork at cost. Then, the whole crew, including invited riders, finished the line by hand over a few weeks before the late August film shoot.
Build, tweak, repeat. Scott Scamehorn updates the berm before the road gap after a first round of testing.
With a rhythm section into a road gap, a 45-foot skipper, and a 65-foot wooden ramp to a dirt landing, the line is large. It’ll only get bigger for the first official Woolley Fest on August 30, 2025, with two more massive dirt-to-dirt options added after the ramp. Riders for the 2024 test session included Zablotny, Brown, Brandon Semenuk, Jaxson Riddle, Armen Davis, Parker Garner, Talus Turk, and Ryan McNulty. They also extended invites to Hannah Bergemann, who couldn’t attend because she was hurt, and Lucy Van Eesteren, who was busy with another endeavor.
First tracks on the road gap. Local boy Armen Davis stepped up, pulled hard, and hit the sweet spot.
Essentially, the Woolley Fest line was a community project, funded by the riders and built upon sweat equity. “It's pretty awesome that our sponsors have the vision enough to allow us to take our budget and put it into something that's not directly for them, but they see the vision,” Talus says.
