Every culture has a subculture, and mountain biking is no exception. Our MTB Misfits series focuses on the folks out there who have found themselves within the fold of freeride mountain biking but, well, don’t ride bikes.
Ethan Brunette, a seventeen year-old from Washington State, is one of those misfits. Brunette started mountain biking around the age of twelve on his local trail system, Duthie Hill in Issaquah - but also spent a lot of time at the skatepark on his scooter. As he gained confidence and familiarity with Duthie by bike, he realized that one way to keep things fresh and interesting without traveling to new trails, was to bring his scootering from pavement to path.
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And that is how his career on a dirt scooter began.
“It definitely went further than I thought it would,” Brunette admits. “But I was going to Duthie a lot on the dirt scooter, and eventually I got a lot of the trails at Duthie, and I was like, ‘Might as well take this bigger.’”
Brunette says his big breakthrough came when he saw a friend post about riding the Port Gamble Forest Heritage park on his bike. “I was like, ‘Dude, how are the jumps built, and could I take the scooter there?’” His friend was encouraging, so Brunette showed up to a jam-style event, Hot Laps, to see it for himself.
“The jumps were bigger than I thought they were for sure when I got there,” says Brunette. “But there was a whip-off event, and a whole bunch of people just hyping each other up, and so I was like, ‘I gotta hit this on the scooter.’” Brunette says he hit the first drop-in and then a massive jump that someone told him later was around thirty feet. “The whole crowd was screaming. It was the biggest thing I’ve ever done on a scooter.”
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Brunette credits good trail building with his success at Hot Laps. “That line was honestly easier than some of the lines at Duthie just because of how well built it was. It just flowed so you don’t have to pull or pump or anything. Yeah it’s big, but it just goes.”
For Brunette, flow is everything. “With the little wheels, it’s so hard to keep speed. You can’t pedal, you can’t make your speed back up. The only thing you can do is just pump. It’s not easy, but it’s so fun.” Brunette says that he rides a dirt scooter from a company called Triad largely because of its ability to hold high air pressure: “There’s one other pretty nice scooter out there, but the Triad can hold like 110 PSI. I mean, it says it can hold 100 PSI, but I run 110.”
Brunette says that beyond tire PSI, his scooter is much better built and far sturdier than the classic Razor most folks envision when they hear the word “scooter.” “You can’t fold it in half or anything,” he explains. “And it’s got a wider fork to fit the 8-inch wheels and a bigger neck so the geometry isn’t messed up.” Brunette says new technology is a large part of why there aren’t more folks like him out there, hitting bigger features on a scooter. “It’s definitely a new thing, because a lot of the old ones, you couldn’t do much on them because you couldn’t trust them. These ones you can, 100%.”
Brunette trusts his gear so much that, after Port Gamble, he decided he was ready to try Blue Steel , a jump line at another regional hill, Galbraith. “I’d known about that line for a while, and I knew it was the biggest in the area. So I went there with my buddy Owen, and we were looking at it for a while - like, we weren’t for sure. I hit the first shark fin and, honestly, I wasn’t gonna do the big jumps afterwards, but these little locals pulled up, and there was this one kid who was like twelve years old and he just started sending the pro line, and I was like ‘I can’t be shown up.’ It took me a lotta runs, but eventually I did the entire line.”
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These days, Brunette says he’s got his focus set on pretty daring dreams. “I would like to be able to hit some Fest-style jumps. I’m not saying Dark Fest , but I’m not saying Dark Fest isn’t possible. I think you never know unless you try it. What I’ve learned for most trails, if I’ve never hit it before, is I just go as fast as I can, because I’ve cased stuff, and it’s just not worth it. If the trail is well-built, and I’ve got the speed on a bike, and there’s no headwind, then I can really do anything on that dirt scooter. It carries a little less speed, for sure, but it can do a lot if conditions are right.”
Brunette says the freeride community has actually played a large part in helping him gain confidence and feel welcomed enough to keep showing up to try new things. “Like, I’ve posted a lot of my videos on social media, and half the comments are people hating it, like “Get off the trails, you’re running the trail.’ But literally everybody loves it at the bike events. Like, during the whip off, I was like “Am I still in?’ and they said ‘Yeah, you keep going man, that’s sick!’”
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To see more footage of Ethan Brunette, and to find out whether he achieves his dream of hitting bigger, Fest-style jumps on his dirt scooter, you can follow him on Instagram.
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