Endless Light Shows Danny MacAskill on a Bosch-Powered Santa Cruz Vala E-Bike in Norway’s Midnight Granite

Scottish rider Danny MacAskill has wanted to experience Norway’s granite slabs for years. This summer he gathered friends, pointed a camera crew north, and spent days on the rock around Narvik while the midnight sun hung in the sky and refused to leave. Bosch eBike Systems backed the short film that came out of that trip, titled Endless Light.

Narvik stands out in Nordland, far north of the Arctic Circle, where fjords cut deep into the mountains and smooth granite hillsides blend smoothly into the scenery like a frozen waterfall. MacAskill and his crew spent three days attacking three named zones that every cyclist in the area is familiar with: Escalator, Superbowl, and Mission Ridge. On this terrain, the rock appears to continue on forever, with water and distant ice glinting tantalizingly just off the edge of the frame.

He rode the Santa Cruz Vayla(CC), a powerful Bosch Performance Line CX eMTB. With 85 Newton meters of torque and a max output of 600 watts, the bike requires riders to do the work, but the motor does provide them with the ability to keep moving even when they would otherwise be trapped walking all day with a bike on their back. MacAskill believed the motor enabled the crew to cover far more land than they would have been able to on a standard bike, and that the Vayla was the ideal tool for the work in Narvik, making the entire trip a once-in-a-lifetime event.

MacAskill continues to do his own thing, even with a motor aid. One sequence has him performing a backward nose manual across a really long slab, which makes your hands sweat just seeing it. Other lines pick their way along a narrow crest before following a long, exposed granite spine flanked by nothing but air. There’s one crazy final run that is so steep that the camera can’t decide whether to follow the rider or go down the slope.

They took advantage of having a small crew and some fantastic friends to film in the continuous light of the midnight sun, which meant no frantic quest for the golden hour or wild sprint against the clock to finish filming before dark. The only thing they had to worry about was the slow, steady change in color when the moist stone was saturated by sunlight.

The soundtrack for the film includes Max Cooper’s ‘A Model of Reality (Tor Remix),’ which is an excellent pick to accompany the gorgeous film. If you’re wondering how they got all of the gear to the location without causing a logistical disaster, another behind-the-scenes video shows how crazy it was. MacAskill’s own perspective on the project is straightforward: he had always been fascinated by the slabs at Narvik, so he booked the entire thing and invited the people he wanted to experience it with along for the ride.
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