It's been 20 years since a couch crash ended a sand-skiing event in B.C.

WARNING: This story contains graphic video of injuries at a sand-skiing event.

For more than three decades, thrill-seekers in Prince George, B.C., hurled themselves down the summertime slope of the Nechako River cutbanks.

First on alpine skis, and later on snowboards and mountain bikes, they dared challenge Prince George's most visible geographic feature — a 60-degree sand and gravel bank formed thousands of years ago by the melting glacial ice sheets that filled the Nechako and Fraser rivers.

The event was called Sandblast, and it was a harrowing exercise of fastest-to-the-bottom wins.

But on Aug. 16, 2003 — in its 32nd year of follies and mayhem — it all came to a crashing halt.

On that sunny Saturday, an old, bulky sofa raised up on bicycle wheels — but with no steering or brakes to give its three riders control — veered off the east side of the course and slammed at ever-increasing speed into two spectators sitting on the hill.

That year was the second of a Sandblast "furniture category," and the incident was scary enough and serious enough that it marked the end of the event altogether. Sandblast became too expensive to insure, and hasn't happened since.

Neal Hagreen organized the last Sandblast. Twenty years later, he says he regrets allowing the couch to go down the hill.

"In hindsight, yeah, it was missing a few components," Hagreen told CBC News from his home in Kelowna. "It was a great day up until that point."

Eric Leach, Jonathan Dyrblom and Shawn Burleigh were the riders on the couch. In video footage that still survives on the internet, the 1970s-style sofa starts running at an angle almost immediately, instead of straight down the hill. As it is approaching the finish line, located about 20 metres from