The Legacy of Baldy Pipe: BMX in full pipes

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.   

Steve Alba tells the story of Baldy Pipe- The original epic skateboard spot

The place where full pipe skating and bike riding was born.  This almost certainly is the first world renowned skateboard spot.  Baldy Pipe.  In the foothills above the San Gabriel Valley, east of L.A..

Disclaimer

East of Los Angeles, in the SAn Gabriel Valley, known for getting clogged full of smog, there's a small reservoir built for flood control  Built in the mid 1950's, it wasn't until 1969 that a skateboarder known as Muck found a huge pipe going into the side of the mountain, part of a spillway for the dam.  Located in the mountains below an L.A. landmark, Mount Baldy, the 14 1/2 foot diameter concrete tube became known as Baldy Pipe.  In the video above, Steve Alba, Badlands local, and a guy who first skated Baldy Pipe around 1975, tells the tale of this skate spot.  For you young guys and gals who don't know who Steve Alba is, watch this, and this, and this, and this.  Known to many as Salba, he's the pool skater's pool skater.  So he's the perfect person to tell the story of place where full pipe skating was born.  

Why is that area called the Badlands?  In the first BMX article I read about Pipeline Skatepark, from 1983, they wrote that a dead body was found there once.  The article made it sound like the body was found in the skatepark.  That may be an urban legend.  If anyone who reads this knows if that's true or not, let me know.  

In any case, as Steve Alba tells the story in the video above, the San Antonio Dam was built from about 1952 to 1955.  The pipe has gates that allow water to flow through the pipe when the water is high, to prevent floods and landslides.  But most of the time the gates are closed, which means the giant pipe is dry.  A guy known as Muck (Pat Mullis) found the pipe in 1969, about 14 years after it was built.  Wally Inouye and friends first skated Baldy Pipe in November of 1973.  That's right, the roots of full pipe skateboarding go all they way back to 1973.  

OK, let's talk about that year.  1973.  That was the year the Roe versus Wade decision on abortion was ruled in the U.S. Supreme Court, the landmark case that just recently got overturned.  Jim Croce's "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown" was one of the most popular songs of the year.  It was also the year that Chinese martial artist and movie star Bruce Lee died.  Skateboarding was mostly being done by a relatively small group of people, who kept skating after the original, mid-1960's skateboard boom.  This film was made of skateboarding in 1973.  Wheelies, 360's, downhill, and slalom were the main styles.  Evel Knievel turned 35 that year, and was gearing up for his Snake River Canyon Jump, which he attempted a year later, in 1974.    Steve Alba turned 10 that year.  Rodney Mullen, BMXfreestyler Dennis McCoy, and me, all turned 8 that year.  Tony Hawk turned 6, and BMX freestyle legend Mat Hoffman turned 1 year old in 1973.  Way back then, almost 50 years ago, full pipe skateboarding was just being born at Baldy Pipe.  

Wally Inouye told Waldo Autry where Baldy Pipe was, and Waldo became the first skater known for skating it, scoring film footage skating there in the the 1976 film, The Magic Rolling Board.  Waldo was clocking in above 9:00 back then, and full pipe skating was beginning to evolve, as the 1970's skateboard boom raced across the U.S. and the world.  Pipeline Skatepark in Upland, in the San Gabriel Valley, below Baldy Pipe, opened in 1977.  It was the first skatepark in the U.S. to have vertical walled pools, and to have a full pipe, paying homage to the local Baldy Pipe.  It became the home park of Steve and Micke Alba, and many others.  Here's Micke Alba tearing up the Combi Pool and the Pipe Bowl in 1987.  The Pipe Bowl at Pipeline was also frequented by BMX vert riders like Eddie Fiola, Mike Doninguez, and Brian Blyther, among others.  Those guys not only shredded the full pipe on bikes, but took BMX vert airs from the 4 to5 foot range up to the 8-9 foot out range, in the mid 1980's.  The Pipe Bowl at Pipeline Skatepark played a key role in the evolution of BMX vert riding.

So that's a look at Baldy Pipe, the undisputed start of full pipe skateboarding and BMX riding, and a quick look at Pipeline Skatepark, a direct descendant of Baldy Pipe.  This was probably the first skate spot that became legendary in both skateboarding and later in BMX.  

The Nude Bowl: Rick Thorne interviews Steve Alba

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.

Disclaimer

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 short 2016 video has photos of some of the history of The Nude Bowl- 1980's to 2016

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. 

Nude Bowl session at 23:56 from Santa Cruz Wheels on Fire- 1987

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.  

Powell-Peralta Archives Nude Bowl video (skating and fire)

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. 

Skateboarding at the Nude Bowl in 1989 with Kester Kasai, Jim Gray, Sal, and Greg Hernandez 

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.  

Nude Bowl segment at 26:54 The Ultimate Weekend (BMX freestyle video)- 1990

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.  

Odyssey to the Nude Bowl - 2021- Odyssey BMX

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.

Nixon/Rolling Stones at the Nude Bowl- 2022

Surprise... some guys with two wheels at the Nude Bowl 2022

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