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.