Rick Thorne's Pool Seekers video by Old School BMXer, Rick Thorne, where he interviews Steve Alba. Also known as Salba, Steve is the pool skater's pool skater, he's been skating pools for over 40 years, and he still tears them up. I picked this video to get this blog going because he's talking about the roots of pool skateboarding, going all the way back to 1974, and the early days of skating at The Nude Bowl in the mid 1980's. Plus this is a clean, well made video from a couple of years ago, which is a bonus.
The Nude Bowl is a left hand kidney shaped swimming pool, high on a hill, out in the middle of the Southern California desert. I won't give the exact location away, but it's within 10 miles of Desert Hot Springs, that's all I'll say. In the 1970's, and possibly earlier, this location was a nudist resort. People drove out in the middle of nowhere to get naked and do naked things. It's such a remote location, that they could stand up there with a drink, let things dangle, and enjoy the epic view, without worrying about anyone getting upset.
There is the foundation from a building, part of the former resort, about 50 feet up the hill, above the pool, and another flat concrete area below. I don't know exactly when the nudists left, but skateboarders somehow found the place in the early 1980's. Salba, in the interview above, says that pro skater Eddie Elguera had been skating it since about 1982.
This video has photos of when the pool got filled up, because of violence during parties there
Being a BMX kid that moved to SoCal in 1986, I first heard of The Nude Bowl in either 1987 or 1988, from some of the skateboarders I knew. One perk of being the only BMX guy working at Unreel Productions in the late 80's, was that I dubbed copies of all the video footage shot for the Vision Skateboards and Vision Street Wear companies. I met several hardcore pool skaters while working there, like Marty "Jinx" Jiminez, Paul Schmitt, Mike Folmer, Jim Gray, and of course, Gator. The Vision Wood Shop crew then included Chicken, Kelly Belmar, and Chuck Hults, all hardcore pool skaters. So when anyone did a video shoot of skating at a new pool, I dubbed a VHS copy of the footage, just as part of my job. I wasn't good friends with any of those guys, but I knew them well enough to ask, "Hey, where's that pool at?" Sometimes they'd tell me, like the San Juan Pool, The Nude Bowl, and the Victoria Street pool, and sometimes they'd keep the location a secret.
My first trip to the Nude Bowl was in the Unreel Toyota van with a couple of skaters, kind of an unofficial video shoot, and excuse to borrow the van to go session in the middle of nowehere. I can't remember who exactly I drove up there with. I'd shoot some video of them skating, and then carve it up on my bike, then shoot some more video. That was either late 1988 or early 1989.
I learned where it was, and made 5 or 6 trips out there between 1989 and 1991 with BMX riders or skaters. Though I could never air worth a damn, I loved the Nude Bowl because it was so far away from anything, that nobody gave a fuck that we were riding and skating. It was the only pool to carve around in and not have to worry about the cops. You could just ride and hang out all day and night, people camped overnight sometimes. Pipeline Skatepark had closed down by then, Del Mar Skate Ranch closed before that, so for several years, the only pools to skate or ride in Southern California were empty backyard pools and the Nude Bowl. The current group of public skateparks didn't start getting built until about 1994-95, and none had decent sized pools for a couple of more years after that.
This is Salba's first session there, that he mentions in the video at the top
Every trip out the the Nude Bowl was a bit of a surprise. Obviously people painted graffiti in the bowl, and around the location, on a regular basis. It was a party spot for young desert kids, though you didn't want to try to drive out of there drunk at night, the Jeep trail was pretty gnarly, and at times it took a 4 wheel drive to get right up to the pool, depending on the ruts at the time.
A couple of trips out there no one else was there, just the small group of BMX freestylers I went with. One time there were a couple of local stoners just hanging out, and skating a little. One time we rolled up, and there was an old guy, probably around 60, sitting there in a lawn chair with a beer, and a couple of his young grandkids roaming around. He lived nearby, and said he liked to come up an watch the skateboarders every now and then.
On one trip out there, I saw what looked like a few pieces of newspaper under a big, football-sized rock, right next to the bowl. There were 6 or 8 copies of a newspaper styled zine called Attitude Problem. It was issue #4 or 5, I think. I grabbed a couple, and later contacted the publisher, a glass blowing, non-conformist minded artist, named Bandhu Scott Dunham, from Arizona. I wrote to him, and he sent me ten or so copies of the current issue of AP, and I put a few out in Huntington Beach, including at Vinyl Solution record shop. He kept sending me a few of every issue, and I kept putting them out in the H.B. area. I wrote a handful of articles for the zine, which was actually a small newspaper. A couple of issues later, I saw an article by pro skater Ed Templeton. He was an H.B. local, so I think he saw a copy at Vinyl Solution, or one of the other spots I dropped them. He wrote at least two or three articles, and I think contributed some art to it. Ed was just starting to get known as an artist at the time, so it was cool to see him contribute to Attitude Problem. I never met Bandhu, but we wrote back and forth several times, and he seemed like a really cool guy.
Haro pro vert rider, Brian Blyther, airing out of the Nude Bowl in 1990. This is a still from my bike video, The Ultimate Weekend. The Nude Bowl has freaky transitions, and big coping, so this is about as high as anyone could air out on a bike.
I was the first person to put video footage of the Nude Bowl in a BMX freestyle video, in The Ultimate Weekend, in 1990. Keith Treanor, John Povah, Mike Sarrail, and I headed out there to shoot video one weekend. I called up Brian Blyther, to see if I could get him to head out as well, being a pool riding legend. Brian was totally cool, and came out to the session, bringing along former Pipeline local, Xavier Mendez, as well. It got up to around 105 degrees that day, so we didn't hang out all day. But we got a good session in, and I got some great footage for the video project, which I put out that fall. I used a song called 'Pool Party," by an Ohio punk band called The Stain. We had used their music several times when I worked at Unreel.
Skateboarder Mark Gonzales bought an album by The Stain, ("I Know the Scam") just because he liked the cover art, when he saw it in a record shop, in about 1988. He brought it into Unreel one day, and one of our producers contacted the band. Jon Stainbrook, the guy behind the band, was super cool, and Unreel started using his music. a lot in videos. I called him when I started working on my own project, and my whole video is their music. But "Pool Party" is all about a skate session in a pool, so I made it a kind of little music video style montage in The Ultimate Weekend, just with bikes.
In the bike world, Mat Hoffman is the first BMXer to carve over the stairs at the Nude Bowl, as far as I know, in 1990 or early 1991, I think. A few months later, Alex Leech and his friend Rob, a skater, came to the U.S. from England, and spent a month long holiday riding all over. They borrowed the sketchiest old van I've ever seen, with something like 220,000 miles on it, and drove it to sessions all over. Keith Treanor, John Povah and I went out to the Nude Bowl with them, in that crazy van, which made it nearly to the top of the hill. We had a great session, it was not 105 degrees that day. Keith was on a mission to carve over the stairs, and he made it, and Alex did as well, going in the opposite direction. The next year, BMX pro racer, jumper, and street rider, Dave Clymer, got the February 1992 cover of Go Magazine, also carving the stairs at the Nude Bowl.
Keith Treanor, the second guy, after Mat Hoffman, to carve over the stairs at the Nude Bowl on a bike, in 1991. From my 2001 video, Animals.
There are a whole bunch of videos on YouTube, spanning the whole era of skating and BMX at the "secret" pool in the desert. There are videos of bands playing, skaters and BMXers of all levels, and other random nonsense at one of the weirdest, coolest spots ever in BMX and skate history. For any of you on Pinterest, I have a Pinterest board with 80 photos from the 80's to 2020's collected, from the Nude Bowl, showing both skating and BMX there, over the years.
I'm not going to tell you exactly how to get to the Nude Bowl, I need to leave a little bit of adventure for anyone who's never been there, but wants to go session it. If you really want to find it, you can find someone who knows the location. Here's one last video, a well made video from Odyssey, posted in 2021, with some serious BMX action in the old swimming pool in the desert, where nekkid people once swam and frolicked.
Tom Dugan, Justin Spriet, Preston Okert, Broc Raiford, and Corey Walsh, tearing up the Nude Bowl, new school style, on BMX bikes
A couple of bonus Nude Bowl videos from 2022, one I found and one a FB friend found.
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