A skateboarder who went to law school. TED Talk by Josh Nims, and his long push to build an official skatepark in Philadelphia.
In the last post, I embedded the documentary about Love Park, the heart of Philadelphia's hardcore skateboarding scene. With the demise of Love Park, skaters took their drive in different directions. Josh Nims was part of the group that took their DIY skateboarding energy into official channels, trying to get city hall behind skateboarding projects. In this TEDx Philadelphia talk, Josh speaks about how a widespread group of supporters came together to build a series of skate spots, even using some of the original granite pieces from LOVE Park.
The result was the Paine's Park skatepark. It's not just a skatepark, but a nexus point for people from many backgrounds, converging in Philly. It's an official skatepark for the hardcore skaters of Philadelphia, and for those cruising through the area on bikes, or walking or jogging.
Now I'm out on the West Coast, with no chance to visit all the places I'm blogging about, right now. As I dig into the videos and websites about different spots, I'm learning more about the scenes in different areas. Just because you build a skatepark, bike park, or climbing gym, doesn't mean you have a scene of people using it. From what I can see, Paine's Park is less popular now than many spots in Philly, but it's a part of the web of skateboard spots in Philly, which has a thriving skateboard scene.
Here's a look at Paine's Park, in a video uploaded around 2016. It's a sunny day, and there are no skaters in sight at that particular time. But there's some great terrain to skate.
Here's a more recent video of Paine's Park, from late 2021 or early 2022. It's still pretty empty, but now covered in graffiti. The great terrain is still there, just not crowds of skaters. This could be a slow time of day, or it could be less used than some of the other skate spots, which there are several around Philly.
LO...VE... with the crooked "O." Draw that on a piece of paper and ask any skateboarder from the 1990's what it represents. They'll know. Any serious skater from that era, around the world. They'll say, "LOVE Park, Philadelphia. Great street skating spot." It was that well known.
Street skateboarding as a genre' got going around 1984, with skaters like Mark Gonzales, Tommy Guerrero, and Natas Kaupas leading the skaters of the world to explore their local urban terrain. Vert skating still ruled through the late 1980's, as far as board sales, fame, and money for the big names. It was the era where Tony Hawk, Christian Hosoi, Steve Caballero and a dozen others battled for fame in the remaining pools and on halfpipes. Then the the third big wave of skateboarding popularity peaked, and it began to drop off. As it dropped, the U.S. dropped into the long recession of the early 1990's. Skateboarding went underground, just as video cameras became inexpensive enough for average people to start making their own videos. A revolution took place in all the fledgling action sports. Home made videos began to take the place of magazines as the main medium.
As all these things were happening, freestyle/street skater turned entrepreneur, Steve Rocco, and his crazy little company with the big name, World Industries, snapped up and promoted street skaters. The tide of skating turned and the next big wave, of the 1990's, was led by the street skaters. In San Francisco, home of Thrasher magazine, the Embarcadero/EMB scene gained fame in the magazines, and early videos. Ledges, benches and rails became the objects of choice.
But at the same time, back East in Philly, where there was no magazine, no major skateboard media, Love Park rose to prominence as a major street skating spot. This video above is the story of the rise, and the death, of the park with the four letter name, LOVE Park. It's the little public park that put the city of Philadelphia on the skateboard map in a huge way.
When the popularity of BMX and mountain bike riding fades, the true riders go underground. Or when it's raining in Kentucky. This is the bike park that was in the Louisville Mega Cavern.
Since BMX and mountain biking have grown in popularity over the last 40 years, bike parks have sprung up in all kinds of places. This is one of the most unusual places I've seen for a bike park, dozens of feet under ground in an old, abandined mine. What is now the Lousiville Mega Cavern was an operating limestone mine from the 1930's into the 1970's. Limestone is the same kind of rock the pyramids in Egypt were built out of. No pyramids here, though.
The mine sat unused for years, apparently, until it was bought by some business developers in 1989. High security offices and storage space was the initial idea. But the place is huge, over 100 acres total. So in the 2010's zip lines, obstacle courses, and Christmas light displays were added to the mix, to better use the remaining space, and make some more money. And a bike park was built. Being a cave, if man made, it stays a constant 58 degrees all year 'round, and it's out of the rain. The total bike park was about 320,000 square feet, I believe. That's ginormous. To put that in perspective, a typical Walmart or Target store is usually around 100,000 square feet. So imagine a BMX and mountain bike park that's the size of a big store, including the parking lot, warehouse area, and everything. That's a lot of bike trails and jumps. The bike park has closed down, in 2019, it appears.
In 2019, after a 3.4 earthquake in Tennessee, a good sized sinkhole formed in part of the Lousiville Zoo, above the Mega Cavern. So if you can't find the unicorns at the Louisville Zoo, that's why, they fell through the sinkhole and hid out in the Mega Cavern. OK, just kidding. The unicorns probably got shot and eaten by hillbillies. But part of the Mega Cavern closed, and one site says that was when the bike park closed. You can read a bit about the history of the Mega Cavern here. The Lousiville Mega Cavern is billed as the #1 attraction in Louisville, even without the bike park. Here's the main website if you want to check out what's happening there now.
Here's a good look at the Grand Opening of the Gale Webb Action Sports Park, in Menifee, California. This video was put out by Rad BMX Builds. This event just happened, November 8th, 2022. The location is 26533 Craig Avenue, in Menifee. Menifee is out in the SoCal desert, about 60-70 miles southeast of Los Angeles, near Lake Elsinore.
Gale Webb has been known as America's Sports Mom since the 1980's. For decades her and her late husband Jim put on action sports shows all over the place, including weeks at a time at Knott's Berry Farm in Buena Park, California. Riders like Eddie Fiola, Martin Aparijo, Scott Freeman, and skateboarders Primo and Diane Desiderio were active riders in her early shows, along with dozens and dozens of top action sports athletes since.
I first heard of Gale Webb in 1985, when I saw a little photo of an woman doing a wheeler on a skateboard in a halfpipe, in Bill Batchelor's Shreddin' zine. Back then, the first story I heard about Gale was that she had survived a terrible skydiving accident, where her shoot didn't open until she was about 150 feet off the ground. Something crazy like that. She made a long, full recovery, and went on to compete in women's motocross for many more years. This was at a time when young kids were just getting into BMX freestyle's first wave, and the third big popularity wave of skateboarding. Gale could ride skateboards, rode motocross really well, and tried her hand at mountain bikes, which were also a new thing back then.
I interviewed Gale for the American Freestyle Association newsletter in 1987, riding my bike to Knott's Berry Farm, since I didn't have a car. She was putting on several BMX and skateboard shows a day there. As luck would have it, Primo and Diane Desiderio got stuck in traffic, and I filled in for the first show, doing a few tricks on my bike. The riders that day, as I recall, were Martin Aparijo, Scott Freeman, freestyle skater Andre' Walton, and a vert skater and BMX ramp rider. I don't think Eddie Fiola was there that day, though he often rode in her shows, when not on tour for GT. Gale was putting on shows like no one else in those days, BMX, skateboarding, inline skating, and occasionally vert roller skaters like Fred Blood and Duke Rennie. Even with all there is to do at Knott's, a major amusement park, her shows drew crowds of 200 to 500 people for every show. I doubt anyone in action sports has shown more kids these sports firsthand than Gale Webb's shows. So it's really cool to see her honored with a great action sports park named after her.
So far there's a BMX/MTB jumping park, a kids BMX park, and a pump track, which can be ridden by BMX and MTB bikes, scooters, and skateboards. I don't know if there's a skatepark at the park yet, it's so new, nothing shows up on Google Maps, but an empty field.
In this video I see Eddie Fiola, 80's BMX vert legend, and the very first King of the Skateparks. I saw 80's freestyler turned supercross announcer Dan Hubbard, as well as new school riders Mike "Hucker" Clark, and Tucker Smith, and I believe MTB rider Dylan Stark, who lives in the area, was there as well. I'm sure several other high level riders were there, those are just the ones I saw in the video above.
Skateboarding, BMX racing, and BMX freestyle all were invented in Southern California, but because land is so expensive, there are few bike parks and pump tracks in SoCal. There are great bike and skateparks all over the U.S. and the world now. So it's really cool to see a really good park opening here in Southern California, where these sports began. I'm sure there are many, many great sessions to come at this park.
There are plenty of great skaters, BMXers, and other riders out there that I've never heard of. Evan Smith is a skateboarder I wasn't familiar with. YouTube tossed this compilation video at me, and it's freakin' amazing, one of the best I've seen in years. Big, tech, all kinds of obstacles and urban terrain. If you like street skating, just watch it.
While this is a Colby Raha video, I'm sharing it so you can check out the crazy backyard ramp set-up that Dennis Enarson has.
When I first started this blog, a couple of months ago. a Colby Raha video popped up on YouTube, as I was getting ready to write the first post. Since I was writing about bike and skate spots, all the weird places that riders and skaters ride and skate, I used Colby's video for post number one. It was a sick looking spillway, a crazy looking spot, and Colby did a 114 foot downhill canyon jump there. You can check that post out here.
Since then, I've watched a bunch of Colby's videos, which are always entertaining. He's a great MX rider, and pretty crazy, and he likes to push the boundaries, and ride some really weird places. He's one of the reasons, probably the main reason, street MX is now a thing. I've done a lot of skate posts, and was looking for another BMX place to write about. It turns out that this video starts out at Dennis Enarson's backyard ramps. But this is one crazy set-up for backyard ramps.
In this video, about 4 of the first 5 1/2 minutes are at Dennis' ramps, and we see Dennis run through a series of lines, showing us what all these ramps are for. The main feature in the center is a big jump box, and that makes sense. But there's a huge undervert banked wall on one side, an under vert curve, a wall ride, a curved corner section, a spine, and ramps at odd angles. Then there's a huge launch ramp, that doesn't seem to lead anywhere. In a few minutes, we see Dennis tear up this place up, alley-ooping into the banked wall, and launhing off that weird launch, carving back to the main landing. There's a whole bunch of interesting ideas going on in this ramp set-up. While backyard ramps have progressed a lot over the last 35 years, I've never seen a set-up like this.
After Dennis and Colby riding the ramps, and a couple of other guys, we see Colby hit the ramps on his motorcycle. The video goes on to how Colby doing a big, downhill bonzai jump in San Diego on his motorcycle, and then they hit up a ditch, and then some curved wall rides on the BMX bikes. Dennis' ramps are one of the most interesting backyard ramp set-ups I've seen, and it may give BMXers out there some ideas for building their own ramps in the future, either in a the backyard, or maybe for a contest or skatepark.
According to the artist who designed it, John Hillding, this is the Bacon and Eggs Pop Art Skateable Sculpture, in Wilkeson, Washington. I love this idea for a whole bunch of reasons. John himself explains his idea behind it in this local news clip. He comes from the world of Pop Art, where Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein are some of the best known names. John Hillding has been into Pop Art since the late 1960's or early 1970's, and has created pieces for Bumbershoot, a Seattle based arts and music festival, over the years. Bacon and Eggs is his most recent big idea, and the late skatepark designer Mark Hubbard, of Grindline skateparks, did the design work to help bring John's vision to life. After Mark's untimely death, Grindline built the sculpture/park.
Pop art never bowled me over, but like everyone, I've seen art by Warhol, Lichtenstein, Koons and others over the years, some of which made me take a second look, wondering about the thinking behind it. Then, in the mid 1990's, I took a bus back east, then hopped in my sister's car, to help her move back to California after graduating college in North Carolina. By the middle of Texas, we were bugging each other a bit from the long hours of driving each day. Then, just outside Amarillo, we drove within site of the Cadillac Ranch, and decided to stop. It was just an empty field with the back ends of all these old Cadillacs sticking out of the ground. I had seen post cards of it, but didn't realize we were going to drive right by it. My sister didn't really want to stop, she was on a schedule to get to San Jose, to move into her new place, and start work as a teacher. But I talked her into stopping.
We were the only ones there when we walked out in the field from the parking area. And we just started laughing. There was no gift shop, no fee, no nothing, just all these old, graffiti'd, Cadillacs sticking up out of the ground. Tired and road weary, we couldn't help but smile. As we wandered around, a couple from Germany, and then a few other people, showed up. We took some photos with the cars, and walked back to her car smiling, in a much better mood. We just couldn't help it.
Much more recently, a couple of years ago, I spent an hour walking around the Newport Beach Art Park, home of Bunnyhenge, shooting photos. The circle of three foot high concrete rabbits is just so ridiculous, and I got a similar vibe as I did at the Cadillace Ranch.
Bunnyhenge, Newport Beach, California (It's on Google Maps)
Yes, it's easy to say acts of absurdity, like these two places, and the Bacon and Eggs skatepark, are a waste of money. You can say that they're stupid, and they're not "art." I say, who the fuck cares? Places like this have an affect on people when we go to them, and that's reason enough for them to exist. It's just hard to walk away from them in a bad mood.
Another thing I love about the Bacon and Eggs skatepark is that a little town, of less than 500 people, built the thing. Wilkeson, Washington, decided to build that sculpture/skatepark, to put their home on the map, in our social media heavy, photo taking world. And it worked. There are several videos on YouTube of groups of skaters sessioning at the park, and Thrasher magazine even covered it.
I think "skateable sculpture" and "BMX rideable sculpture," are great ideas, and I think we will see more of it in the future. Personally, I'm waiting for an enlightened architect to design an action sports themed subdivision, and actual place for people to live where the sidewalks are half pump tracks, and there are jumps and grind rails and pools to ride all over the neighborhood. Golf communities? Yeah, hang up the plaid pants grandpa, lets design some kick ass places to live for THIS century.
A little town none of us had ever heard of, Wilkeson, Washington, ante'd up and made a cool sculpture/skatpark. Who's next in this line of progression? That's what these sports are all about, right?
One main theme of The Spot Finder blog/concept is to get my fat ass back on a bike before too long, and go check out lots of cool places to ride and skate, along with interesting art projects. Bacon and Eggs is on my list of places I definitely want to visit someday. How 'bout you?
I've tried at least 50 blog ideas in the last 15 years. When I get going, 500 page views is the first milestone I really pay attention to. It's a sign that someone out there is actually checking out what you're doing on a regular basis. So thank you for checking this new idea out, I'm more stoked on this than any idea I've had for quite a while. I'll do my best to keep this blog worth checking out.
This segment is from episode 9 of the Road Fools BMX video series, produced by the Props crew. Several top BMX riders seek out and find the famed Baldy Pipe, which hides in the mountains above the San Gabriel Valley, east of Los Angeles. According to 23Mag, BMX database, Road Fools 9 riders were: Jim Cielencki, Kevin Porter, Nate Hanson, Bruce Crisman, Allistair Whitton, Matt Beringer, Brian Wizmerski, Pat Juliff, Brian Foster, Ryan "Biz" Jordan, and Greg Walsh.
Jim does the crazy drop into the pit, Matt is the one riding cross legged. Wizmerski is the guy with the long dreads. I don't see Brian Foster in this clip. In any case, this is one seriously talented group of Mid School BMX riders, sessioning Baldy Pipe in January of 2002.
A few posts back, in this post, I dug into the history of Baldy Pipe, the place where full pipe skateboarding and bike riding began. Built in the mid 1950's, an hour's drive, in traffic, east of L.A., the 14 1/2 foot diameter concrete full pipe was first found by locals in 1969. A few kids were skating, and maybe riding bikes in it, as early as 1973. You can check the video in that post with Steve Alba, to find out more. For the BMX world, Baldy Pipe is what inspired Stan Hoffman, builder and owner of Pipeline Skatepark in nearby Upland, to create the first full pipe built intentionally for skateboarding. The skaters told Stan to build it a bigger, so they made it a full 20 feet in diameter, and that set the Pipe Bowl at Pipeline apart from any other skatepark in the late 1970's.
That's also the bowl where riders like Eddie Fiola, Brian Blyther, Mike Dominguez, Jeff Carroll, Steve McCloud, Rich Sigur, Tony Murray, Tim Rogers, and a few others, really set the stage for BMX vert riding. The face wall of the Pipe Bowl, where riders did their biggest airs, had an 8 foot transition, and 4 feet of vert. Most people forget about that four feet of vert. It was there that these riders took the BMX aerial, as airs were first called, from about 3 to 5 feet out, and pushed the limits to 8, 9, maybe even 10 feet out of the bowl.
Early BMX freestyle pioneer turned entrepreneur, Bob Morales, put on the first large contests there, under the banner of the American Skate Park Association (ASPA), in 1984. The first "national" contest series in BMX freestyle, Bob turned trick riding from an activity into a somewhat organized sport. Here's a clip of video producer Don Hoffman asking Bob Morales to explain safety gear and freestyle bikes, with Eddie Fiola, at Pipeline. I wound up working for both Bob and Don a couple years later, and these two were key people in the early years of BMX freestyle.
In 1984, Bob also put flatland and quarterpipe/kickturn ramp contests, and changed the organization to the AFA, the American Freestyle Association. This era, 1983-84, is when BMX freestyle started blowing up in the BMX magazines, when FREESTYLIN' magazine debuted, and many of us across the U.S., and in the U.K., and Europe, first saw high airs in the Pipe Bowl at Pipeline, as well as Del Mar Skate Ranch.
So full pipe riding has been a part of BMX vert since the really early days. The original King of the Skateparks was Eddie Fiola, seen here riding the Pipe Bowl in 1985. I believe that's the first 540 air in a contest in this video. The other top riders pushing limits in the full pipe, that we have video of now, were Brian Blyther,Mike Dominguez, U.K. rider Craig Campbell, and the craziest of them all, Hugo Gonzalez. Hugo did that fence plant out of the Pipe Bowl three years before wall rides were invented, for him, landing was always optional. Before the word "huck," there was Hugo.
You can see more footage of Pipeline Skatepark, including local shredder Jeff Carroll, who invented the no handed air, in this clip, at 4:32. This BMX Plus! video, from 1985, also has some early BMX footage at Pipeline, featuring Steve McCloud, Brian Blyther, and Tony Murray, at 19:22 in the video. Pipeline Skatepark was the last of the old, 1970's era skateparks in California, to close down, in 1988. As luck would have it, I worked for Don Hoffman, whose dad owned Pipeline, so I got to ride some, and shoot video of pool skaters, in some of the last sessions in early 1989, after the park was closed, but before it got demolished. Eddie Fiola and Brian Blyther came up for a couple of final sessions as well. Here's someone's footage of Eddie Fiola after Pipeline closed. You can see all the fences separating all the bowls were taken down by then, and that made a whole bunch of new lines possible, like the alley-oop flyouts Eddie is doing. A new Skatepark in Upland was built in the 2000's, seen in this clip, and it has another 20 foot diameter full pipe, paying homage to the original Pipeline Skatepark. But bikes are banned, as far as I know. After Pipeline closed, there were still a few intrepid BMXers here and there who made the journey to ride Baldy Pipe, and other full pipes, in the many years since. There are also a few full pipes built at skateparks, along with some capsule bowls that go a full circle. Here are some of the best BMC full pipe videos I found online, some featuring Baldy Pipe, and some at other pipes.
Here's a Baldy Pipe trek video from a crew from New Jersey, it sounds like, in 2009. This bunch of BMX guys crossed the country, and wanted to see this spot, the big concrete hole in the mountain, firsthand, that they have heard about for years. One thing I've learned from watching full pipe videos all day today is that most of them involve a crazy journey just to get to the pipe. Yes, this is pretty obvious, since they are parts of dams or major waterworks projects, usually. Yet there are at least a few rideable full pipes in skateparks, and they all have their roots in Baldy Pipe, sitting below the San Antonio dam, an hour east of L.A.
Here's a five minute edit of a bunch of Southern California BMX riders, on their mission to ride Baldy Pipe, in 2019 or 2020. This is a pretty funny video, and I dig the peg/cess slide the one guy did in the pipe. They even saw a tarantula on the way in, to spice up the trip. That's one desert creature I haven't run into yet in my many years in California.
It's not just guys who seek out Baldy Pipe. The young woman in this video isn't riding a BMX bike, but I don't think you'll mind. She made the journey up to Baldy, with another way to session the big full pipe.
This video section is one of the greats of all time, from 2005, Morgan Wade's section from Drop the Hammer. In this insane section full of a million tricks, he double loops a skatepark full pipe, does some riding at Baldy Pipe, and then loops Baldy Pipe on his BMX bike at the very end. This video put both Morgan Wade and Baldy Pipe on the the map for a whole bunch more peoplein the BMX world.
Here's the Red Bull Full Circle video. Sebastian Keep, Morgan Wade, Matt Berringer, and Mike "Hucker" Clark, in an elbow full pipe in the middle of nowhere, Wyoming. Of course it's nuts. Just watch.
I found one BMX full pipe trip video from south of the border. Anthony Panza and friends made the trip to this really smooth looking full pipe, somewhere outside of Tijuana, Mexico. After arguing about whether to search for rattlesnakes and mountain lions, they get down to a session in the pipe. This video is from a couple of years ago, a full 35 or 40 years after BMXers first sessioned Baldy Pipe, and the first top skatepark riders showed the world how to ride a full pipe, at Pipeline Skatepark. After some van trouble, they guys made it up to a skatepark in Encinitas, California, to show off their street ridng skills.
Sebastian Keep, or Bas as his friends seem to call him, is doing some of the most technical, huge and burly riding I've seen in recent years. If you've seen his Walls videos, you know what I mean. Looking up BMX pipe videos, I found this one, of Bas and a crew going into a gigantic full pipe, near Lisbon, Spain, about four years ago. I just watched it, and it's freakin' nuts. When you have some top level riders talking about helicopter air ambulances on video, if a rider misses a trick, you know it's serious shit going on. This is one of the most dodgy BMX spot treks I've seen, ever, and the biggest full pipe anyone's found so far.
In this post, early on in this blog, I wrote about a couple of still largely unknown full pipes, in Westminster, California. They are only 8 or 9 feet in diameter, so you can't carve high up in them. But I rode them a few times in the early 1990's, then pretty much forgot about them. For you Old Schoo/Mid School BMXers, they were a short ride from the P.O.W. House, the Pros Of Westminster, where I lived for a bit in '92 and '93. I found them, but no one else from the house wanted to go check them out. Yet, we once packed up the cars and rode a nearly identical full pipe, and the ditch it fed into, nearly and hour and a half away. In the small full pipes, the main thing to do is ride down them and carve back and forth, and maybe air out the end of the pipe. Nothing super gnarly, but still fun. They're only a couple of miles away from where the Van's Huntington Beach Skatepark is now.
While never as popular as park and street riding, half a century after the first kid rolled a bike around in Baldy Pipe, a few riders are still going to great lengths to seek out, get to, and ride full pipes, in all kinds of crazy places. There are some other BMX full pipe videos online, not to mention the parks with partial pipes and capsules out there these days. There are a ton of skateboard full pipe videos as well, if this post got you interested in riding one. Check the "History of Baldy Pipe" post, linked above, for links to several of those. I learned a few things writing this post, found video of full pipes I've never heard of, and found more proof that Sebastian Keep is a freakin' alien or something. He's just on another level, and is really pushing BMX, by doing really progressive riding in some of the most obscure places imaginable. Thanks for checking out this post, there will be plenty more to come.
A look at a handful of classic street skating spots by the Skate or Died YouTube channel.
I'm not the only guy who has looked into the history of classic skate spots, though I haven't seen anyone do this for BMX spots. In this video, this YouTuber shows us history behind El Toro, Wallenberg, the Carlsbad Gap, Hollywood High Rails, and the gigantic Lyon 25 stair set. This video shows the best tricks landed down each, and a solid history of some of the best known street skating spots seen in skateboarding videos over the last 25 years.
This clip is from Beefs TV YouTube channel, and it's the best and craziest surfng footage I've ever seen at The Wedge, in Newport Beach, California. How gnarly is The Wedge? Count the broken boards in this video, that will give you an idea.
A little look at surfing history and its ties to Southern California
As you may know, surfing originated in the Hawaiian Islands hundreds of years ago. It nearly faded out in the late 1800's, due to the missionaries and haoles who took over the islands. Right around 1900, a group of young watermen in Waikiki brought the sport back, and started surfing there on huge traditional Hawaiian boards.
What few people know is that writer Jack London, best known for novels about gold miners in the Yukon gold rush, like The Call of the Wild, and White Fang, was also a travel writer. He sailed to Hawaii, around 1907. He wrote and article for a women's magazine about the surfers of Waikiki. Thousands of miles away on the mainland of the U.S., Southern California railroad magnate, Henry Huntington, was showed the article by his wife. At the time, Henry was developing an area of the beach west of Los Angeles, Redondo Beach. Henry hired the expert surfer, swimmer, and diver, George Freeth, to come to California and give surfing and diving demos in Redondo Beach, to promote the new community.
For any who may be wondering, yes, Huntington Beach was named after Henry Huntington. It wasn't because he lived there, he didn't. The developers of Pacific City, as H.B. was called around 1905, changed the name to Huntington Beach to encourage the railroad man to build a route from Long Beach to Huntington Beach. They needed to attract more people down to the new beach town. It worked, and more people started traveling down to the sleepy coast town in Orange County. Then, in 1920, oil was discovered in Huntington Beach, and people flowed in, trying to strike it rich. Huntington Beach became known as "Surf City" in the 1950's and 1960's, the name made famous in the Jan & Dean song, "Surf City."
Back to the surfing, not long after George Freeth traveled to the mainland, a younger member of the Waikiki crew, Duke Kahanamoku, also came to California to show off his surfing skills. Over the 1900's and 1910's, Both men showed surfing to many beach goers in California. Freeth wound up dying during the Spanish Flu pandemic, in 1919, getting sick after a heroic act rescuing people from drowning. Duke continued to show the sport of surfing to people in California, and around the world, and became known as the Father of Modern Surfing.
Duke was alive to see surfing explode in popularity, driven by the music and movies from Southern California in the 1960's. People began surfing around the world, inspired by the movies of surfers on longboards in Malibu, primarily. While surfing was blasted to worldwide popularity from California, most SoCal waves really aren't that big. As surfing moved to new areas, short boards were invented, and surfers improved, they kept seeking bigger and bigger waves. Surf spots like Pipeline, Waimea Bay, Jaws, and others in Hawaii, gained fame. Other huge breaks began to be surfed around the world, like Teahupoo in Tahiti, Maverick's in Northern California, Todos Santos in Mexico, and more recently ,Nazarre, Portugal, all with gigantic waves, when the right swells came in.
While surfing and California go together in many people's minds, all of the biggest waves were located far away from Malibu, Los Angeles, and Southern California. Almost all, that is. There is one gigantic wave right on the beach, barely 40 miles from downtown L.A.. That wave is The Wedge. Located at the end of the four mile long Newport Beach Peninsula, The Wedge rises up to a tumultuous, triangle shaped wave, when the perfect swell rolls in. Faces can rise 20 to 25 feet, and it breaks right over the wet sand, which has led to many serious injuries, The Wedge wave forms by the Newport Harbor entrance jetty, where big swells get squished into the corner of the beach and jetty, causing a huge, dangerous, and really deformed shaped wave. For decades it was considered too crazy and dangerous to surf. As surfers began chasing huge waves around the globe, big days at The Wedge were ridden mostly by Boogie boarders, and only the best and craziest of them.
Over the past 30 years or so, a few surfers began to venture into big days at The Wedge, and they take a beating for their attempts to ride it, and catch the huge, but short-lived tube that often forms, then quickly closes out. I've shot video at The Wedge three times on big days, and it's just plain insane to see up close. The force of the wave coming down in such shallow water, make you continuously wonder if the body boarders and surfers disappearing underwater are still alive. It's an amazing site to watch people catch that wave on big days up close. Crowds of 300 or more people are not uncommon, as word gets around that it's big at The Wedge. This video has more great surf rides there in 12 minutes, than I've seen in all the hours I've shot video there on big days. It's well worth watching.
These days, there are now three gigantic waves in the Southern California area. They are all remarkable for different reasons, besides the size of the largest waves that form. The Wedge is one of the world's most dangerous beach breaks. You can see that in the video above. The next huge SoCal wave (sort of), is Cortes Banks. It's a gigantic wave in the open ocean, about 100 miles west of San Diego. Once holding the title for the biggest wave ever surfed, Cortes Banks is renowned to serious surfers, despite it's location. But still largely unknown, there's an even crazier wave, off the west side of San Miguel Island, one of the Channel Islands, about 90 miles west of Los Angeles. Shark Park is not only one of the heaviest, and least known giant waves in the world, it's also teeming with great white sharks, due to huge seal populations nearby. In a sense, surfing has come full circle to California, which took the Hawaiian sport and spread the word around the world. Now there are these three really serious waves on and off the Southern California coast, that have now been surfed, all rating among the craziest surf breaks in the world.
Since I've been writing this blog, I've started looking up random stuff, and watching way more action sports videos. This has definitely helped the usually lame YouTube algorithm pull up some interesting stuff. This one totally surprised me.
While I lived on a lake in Ohio for 2 1/2 years as a kid, wakeboarding hadn't been invented yet. The Wetbike had just been invented, but it was another 7 years before the original, stand-up Jet Ski came out, and several more years until PWC's really evolved. Waterskiing and tubing were popular at the time I lived on the lake. Tubing, as in getting pulled on an inner tube behind a boat. But my family didn't have a boat, and we lived at the very end of the lake, where a creek flowed into it. So most of my lake life was swimming at the lodge, and fishing without catching much other than average sized bluegill and crappie.
That said, my friend Robert found the little pool below the spillway, which nobody ever bothered to hike down to. The small, 30 foot long, 10 foot wide pond had a few big bass, and a bluegill that broke my rod and then got away. We made several trips to fish there when we were about 12. One day there was a fair amount of water flowing through the square hole in the center of the 50 foot high spillway ramp. Since there was usually a little water flowing, there was a big trail of algae below the hole, which made the rough concrete slippery. Robert got the idea of trying to hit it as a waterslide. Much to our surprise, it worked.
We hiked up the side of the steep spillway ramp, ran sideways across it, towards the water flowing from the hole, and landed on our hip in the middle of it, then slid 20 or 30 vertical feet down the ramp. We splashed into the two foot deep, big, rectangle pool, full of big carp. A tiny bit of water flowed out of that concrete pool, through some big rocks, then into the smaller pool below, where the big bass and bluegill lived. We hit the improvised redneck waterslide so many times that we both wore through the back pocket and most of our Toughskins jeans underneath. The concrete under the algae was rough, and the last couple of slides nearly took a little skin. Robert and I had a blast.
Needless to say, we also both got our asses tanned for ruining our jeans, when we got home. But it was worth it. So, crazy as it sounds, I have a bit of experience at spillway sliding. But the guys in this video take it to an entirely insane level. I've seen the in-lake ramps, walls, and rails in wakeboarding videos before, as well as cable pull wakeboarding. But I've never seen anything like this. Street wakeboarding, or pretty close to it. The progression continues. This is nuts, don't try it. But it's cool to watch. Another example of how action sports people look at the world completely differently than average people. Then comes the crazy idea, "Hey, you think we could jump that?"
