Big Wheel

Kris Holm is taking the unicycle out of the circus and into the mainstream, one mind-blowing move at a time

" There's a playground I've been checking out," Kris Holm says, quietly. For a variety of reasons, this is not something a 32-year-old man should admit. But because Holm is holding a unicycle, the statement oddly makes sense. And the idea of following him to a playground in Vancouver is intriguing rather than creepy.

With his slight build (he's 5'10", 150 pounds) and polite manner, Holm has the Clark Kent facade going for him. He holds a master's degree in physical geography, works by day as a geomorphologist (he studies landslides) and is void of bravado, stray piercings, slang-laced vocabulary and look-at-me-I'm-a-multicolored-badass tattoos. Yet when he slips into his baggy riding shorts and pushes a helmet over his tousle of blond hair, Holm transforms into a demon who cuts down mountains at 20 mph, rides the edge of volcanoes, pedals railings on 200-foot-high bridges and rolls along the Great Wall of China. All on one wheel.

"Kris has completely defined what is possible on a unicycle," says riding partner Nathan Hoover. Adds John Long, a rock climbing pioneer and onewheel convert: "Kris is in another realm as far as sports go. He practically invented mountain unicycling, and he set the bar awfully high."

From a hill overlooking downtown Vancouver, a colorful entanglement of plastic swings, slides and metal ladders rises from the ground. The sky threatens rain on this August morning, and the place is virtually empty. Holm wears battered shin guards, a silver helmet and a crimson jersey from his clothing sponsor, Horny Toad. He has won several championships and appeared on numerous videos and TV shows, and if you watch him for one minute, it's clear why he's considered the unicycling world's most radical rider.

With no more effort than it takes to sit on a couch, he mounts his 14-pound Kris Holm-model knobbytire unicycle and plows a trail through the gravel. He reaches the first obstacle, grips the handle under his seat and, in a pogo-stick motion, bounds up-up!- the ladder of a sliding board, tire boinging rung to rung. At the top, a good 15 feet above ground, he rides the rims and railings of the entire structure, looking for "good lines," which is unicycle-speak for anything rideable. In Kris' case, that means any surface wider than a dime.

As Holm prepares to jump from the piping of the monkey bars, still aboard his unicycle, a small boy walking past tugs his mother's sleeve. "Mommm!" he shouts. "Look what he's allowed to do!" Holm flings himself into the air and lands wheel-first in the gravel. The mother hurries her son along.

HOLM WAS 11 when he saw a Vancouver street performer riding a unicycle while playing a violin. "I played the violin too, so I thought it would be fun to try a unicycle," he says. For his 12th birthday, Holm's parents gave him his first ride; over the next 13 years, he hopped, swerved, mounted and crashed his way over the driftwood and rocks along the Vancouver shoreline. He put aside his first love, rock climbing, to devote more time to pedaling. From the beginning, he was a natural, with great balance and the ability to analyze terrain quickly, already at ease in precarious situations high above ground.

For years, Holm imagined he was out there on his own, in a kind of parallel universe, where the only other people who shared his interest collected paychecks from the circus. "Imagine what it's like to be into a sport and not know that anyone else in the world does it," he says. But his world changed in 1998, when a web search turned up dot-coms, personal blogs, college clubsabout a dozen sites devoted to single-wheel riding. His discovery would soon change his sport.

Holm had already established a local reputation as a maniac on one wheel. His biggest challenge? The only unicycles he could buy were no match for his ability to bounce down mountains and fly off ledges. He was always tinkering, from resoldering axles to wrapping twine around tires for better traction. And he assumed that other cyclists would also be interested in a better ride.

In 1999, Norco Bikes, a Vancouver outfit that had signed Holm as a rider the previous year, agreed to build his line of mountain unicycles. The first of three "munis" under the Kris Holm Unicycle banner hit the market in early 2003, and Holm took over production from Norco later that year. His company now sells four kinds of cycles, plus components and wheels, to burgeoning markets in North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, grossing $250,000 in sales in 2004, which tripled the previous year's mark. Holm, who juggles his business with his full-time job and 14 hours a week of riding, is pushing to hit half a million in sales by 2008, thanks to next year's planned launch of the world's first geared unicycle. This might seem like spare change in most sports markets, but Holm considers it a stellar start. "Unicycling's status is similar to mountain biking 30 years ago," he says.

Laugh if you want about his dream of bringing unicycling to the masses, but remember: there were lots of snickers 25 years ago when snowboard pioneers raved about surfing powder.

Holm organized and won the first North American trials in 1999, beating out 34 other riders. (In trials cycling, competitors are scored on their ability to maneuver around obstacles.) He also won the North American downhill title that year and again in 2001. He topped a field of 78 to take the inaugural world trials in 2002 and added a European crown this year. Holm estimates, based on sales figures, that more than 50,000 kids and adults around the world now ride regularly. The sport's disciples include skier Bode Miller, Hall of Fame quarterback Steve Young, skateboarder Rodney Mullen, former Formula One champion

Mika Hakkinen and actor Johnny Depp. Some ride for the fun of it. Others use the sport as the ultimate in cross-training: "It is exhausting," says Long, the climber-turned-cyclist. "There is no rest. Every time the wheel turns, your leg turns. It'll cook your legs in less than 300 yards."

But not if you're Kris Holm. It takes a lot more than that to tire the sport's preeminent rider, a man who once rode up and down Mexico's 18,500-foot El Pico de Orizaba volcano in 12 hours. Back in Vancouver, on a gray summer day, Holm has grown bored of the obstacles in the playground on the hill and says it's time to move. He throws his equipment into the back of his '86 Honda Civic and heads for the famous freeride mountain bike trails of the North Shore forests outside the city. Two miles by wheel and foot into the trees, a series of bizarre man-made log obstacles wind between the redwoods. Rickety wooden ladders, seesaw planks and train-track slats hover above the rocky forest floor. The place is eerily quiet and looks like the lair of a mutant hamster. Sighting an Ewok or a Yeti here would be less surprising than seeing what Holm does next.

He rides up a ramp to a 30-foot-long, mosscovered log 10 feet above ground, pedals the length of it, then launches off the end. Two mountain bikers pull off the trail to watch. "It's not every day you get to ride behind greatness," says one to the other. "That's Kris Holm. He's insane." Over the next two hours, Holm rides roller-coaster ladder bridges and a series of three teeter-totters (each eight feet long and six inches wide) called the Discombobulator. He tames most of the obstacles but still takes his share of nasty falls. He bounces up after each, readjusting a shin guard or elbow pad. "You actually get better from falling," he says. "Your balance improves, and you figure out how to fall and not get hurt."

It was here in the North Shore, back in 1997, that word first spread about a guy wheeling through the woods on half a bike. Video producer Todd Fiander gave Holm a starring role in North Shore Extreme II , the first film to feature Holm and the outer limits of unicycling. "I put the scary in scary stuff," says Fiander, who's known for his footage of mountain bikers on impossibly dangerous trails. "Some of the drops, man, are like 16 feet. I had to tell Kris not to do stuff." Holm has since shown up on more than 50 TV shows and 15 videos. If it's high, sharp, dangerous and deadly, he's been filmed riding it.

The results haven't always made him happy. "Sometimes they set the footage to screaming music and want to label it as extreme," says Holm, back home at the Vancouver condo he just bought with wife Shannon. "It's not really like that." Of course the producers crunch together the action and the scary stuff. Of course they make Holm look as gonzo as possible. "They focus on the edges and ridges because it's easy to understand," he says. "You fall, you die."

And that's the point. Holm has done a lot of crazy stuff on one wheel, but he says he's never launched with a damn-the-consequences attitude. Quite the opposite. He spends his days performing risk assessment for an engineering company, making sure areas around the world are safe from landslides and other natural hazards. So it's only fitting he takes an equally calculated approach to challenges on his unicycle. When granted permission to pedal across one-week-old hot lava in Hawaii's Volcanoes National Park in 2003, Holm did his homework. "I knew I couldn't touch it," he says, "but I saw I could ride on it when my tire didn't melt."

In 2004, the German TV show Record Fever asked Holm to ride the railing of a 200-foot-high bridge in Hawaii. The ledge was a foot wide with reflector bumps every 10 feet. If he rode over the reflectors, he could stay in the center, farthest from the edge; riding around them would give him a smoother line, but would also push him closer to doom. To choose his course, Holm envisioned a ride along the same rail positioned just a few feet above the ground. He knew his best line in those safe conditions would be to ride around the reflectors. So, perched on the rail with cameras rolling, Holm took a deep breath, got into his zone and began pedaling. He completed the rail perfectly, slipping around the reflectors just as he had planned. "Once you're riding," he says, "you don't think about consequences."

Amazingly, Holm has never broken a bone or suffered more than bumps and bruises, sprains and stitches. The best way for the rest of us to truly appreciate this is to hop on a unicycle too. Or at least try. After a day of showing his stuff, Holm takes a writer to a park near his condo and offers a few cursory tips: hold the seat with your hand, place one foot on the pedal …

A few shin bruises and face-plants later, the visitor is still not able to sit on the damn thing without holding the shoulders of Kris and Shannon. And each attempt at pedaling leads to another unwilling dismount after a lousy quarter revolution. Holm promises victory with a few more tries. "Anything that is worthwhile takes time and effort," he says. "Anyone can ride a unicycle."

Easy for him to say. Nearby, a man walking a dog watches Holm roll down the path, then calls out, "Where's your other wheel, man?"

Holm just smiles and keeps riding.

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