Danny MacAskill Video Shows Heart-Stopping Mountain Biking On Narrow Scottish Ridges

In Danny MacAskill’s video, you may not breathe for about seven minutes.

Cut Media recently released a short film on YouTube called The Ridge, depicting trials cyclist MacAskill casually riding a mountain bike through the precarious ridges of the rocky Cuillin mountain range in Scotland.

Danny MacAskill’s video shows him returning home to the Isle of Skye, where he grew up seeing the inaccessible Cuillin mountains.

“I’ve always wondered whether it would be possible for me to ride my mountain bike up there,” Danny says in the opening of the video.

It does not seem like it should but yes, it is possible.

MacAskill climbs up boulders, leaps from one ledge to another, and glides along narrow ridges hundreds and thousands of feet up. The Cuillin’s highest point is 3,255 feet. One second of unbalance or a wheel turning the wrong way would send him plummeting off a sheer cliff. And yet, Danny makes the entire exercise seem effortless. A fallen tree becomes a slim bridge between two rocks. He hops across chasms and does a cartwheel over a fence, all without ever touching his feet to the ground.

The remarkable yet nerve-wracking video is accompanied by beautiful Celtic fusion music by the late Martyn Bennett, from his album Grit, which adds to the feeling that for Danny this is no big deal.

As Business Insider reports, Danny MacAskill’s video was made by Cut Media. The crew used several cameras to edit together Danny MacAskill’s video. Two camera operators were accompanied by a flying drone camera to capture aerial shots. A GoPro camera is also attached to MacAskill’s helmet to capture panic-inducing angles from his perspective. A mountain guide was also present to accompany the small crew.

This is not the first Danny MacAskill video. His amazing urban biking puts parkour to shame. In 2009, he burst on to the scene with his home-made video that went viral. His mountain biking around the city of Edinburgh instantly won him fans. He drew attention again in 2011 with another viral video of his trip from Edinburgh to Isle of Skye. Both of those videos have raked in over 33 million views each. The following year, he performed the biking stunts in the Joseph Gordeon-Levitt film Premium Rush. He also teamed up with Red Bull Media for some online videos, including him biking through forgotten ruins of the once submerged city of Epecuén in Argentina. That video has over 3 million views.

Danny MacAskill’s video The Ridge has only been online for three days and already has over five million views.