A guy named Ryan and a guy named Horse loaded 700 hay bales onto the back of a flatbed trailer and took them from the Eel River Valley up to a steep road west of a different, much higher valley, about a year ago. They could only take around 250 at a time, so it took them a few trips, but when they were set up, they were in-place for people to crash into them at speeds exceeding 60 miles an hour — God forbidding — if they couldn’t force their skateboard, gravity cart, street luge, or other sundry downhill speed machine to turn a hairpin bend at precisely the right angle, at the right time, in the right place. More than 100 people from seven countries went gaga for the opportunity, and it was such a massive success, Ryan and Horse are doing it again this year. 

Ryan (Farmer) and Horse (government name Troy Branham) founded the event last September. Rollin’ on the Res ‘26 will require fewer hay bales — only 400 this year, offset by an increase in big, cushy foam blocks — but even more people are descending on Hoopa next weekend, about 200 people from all over the world: Brazil, Argentina, several European countries; five are coming from Japan, and around 20 from Canada, who are using the race as a qualifier to decide their country’s representatives in the 2028 World Skate Games. Not all of them are competing; some are there just to volunteer or ride the road for fun.

This year’s edition is, Farmer claims, the first downhill event to completely sell out since the pandemic. When registration opened in April, riders snagged all the spots within two days. They’re coming, Farmer told the Outpost, because the course is one of the “top roads” in North America to ride a gravity vehicle down. Pine Creek Road splits off from Bald Hills Road in the mountains above the Hoopa Valley, dropping thousands of feet on its way down to the Trinity River. Riders speed down a 2.2 mile segment with an average decline of negative 10% and 12 notable corners. (Most tracks only have two or three really tight corners.) It’s an imperative that they brake for these 12 corners, Farmer said. If disobeyed, the consequence is painful but simple: the hay bales and foam blocks get a bid for every spectator’s attention while the rider gets an introduction to them at somewhere around double the speed limit. (They’re usually fine. They wait until there’s an opening in the stream of riders and hop back in.)

Pine Creek Road is superlative not only because of its physicality, Farmer said, but also because the tribe recently repaved the road, making it magnificently smooth. Farmer, by day a forestry technician, is a bit of polymath; he ran for Ferndale’s city council in 2024, runs a darkroom studio, and, in 2022, won the Street Luge World Championship in Argentina. He’s checked out many of Humboldt’s steep and windy roads with the intent to skate or ride down them, but most of them had too many potholes. Branham, a friend of his he met at a gravity cart race, is a boat racer and Hoopa tribal member (and a “wonderful human being,” Farmer said), and he told Farmer that there was a road nearby, a perfect one: few guardrails, very little traffic, not many things to crash into. Branham had conquered it on a mountain bike plenty of times. Farmer was a tad skeptical. He’d checked the road out before, and wasn’t impressed. But it had been redone, and Farmer rode down it once on his skateboard, and then another time on his street luge. He was “blown away,” he said. 

The race in 2025 went superbly. People loved the course and the atmosphere, Farmer said. Most of them camped at Tish-Tang, and the many out-of-town racers loved the showers, the saunas, the Trinity River — for most events, Farmer said, they usually just post up in an amenity-barren field.

Farmer has traveled worldwide to race, places he’d never have gone to otherwise, and he’s excited to bring people to a place he loves (and pump some tourists into it). He’s grateful to the tribe for letting them put it on. 

He’s been asked many times what it’s like to bomb down a hill at a million miles an hour, and his response is smooth and well-practiced:

“Really, the core feeling of going down a hill is a little bit of bliss and peace,” Farmer said.

“When you get down to the bottom,” he continued, “You have that exhilarating rush, as do all the people around you…It’s a little break from the world, and the community is so supportive. That feeling of going down the hill is something that we all know is there. And it’s not just the exciting part of going down the hill; it’s what brings us together and gives us something to look forward to, and gives us some sort of healing in this rough environment.”

Rollin’ on the Res will be hosted September 10-13. Branham wasn’t available for comment.