Dennis Enarson's backyard ramp set-up

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.    

Best surfing video of The Wedge... and a history lesson of surfing

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.  

Street wakeboarding- Yeah, that's a thing...

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?"  

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..

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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.  

Vox talks to Tony Hawk about legendary skateboard spots

Two years ago, Vox.com got Tony Hawk on Zoom, and made this video about legendary skateboard spots, asking for Tony's input on them.  

Disclaimer

For a group outside the skateboard industry, Vox produced a really cool look at many of the best known skate spots, and how obscure urban places become famous worldwide in skateboarding.  I am, by no means, the first person to look at the history of action sports spots, and how obscure places like a ditch, a set of stairs, or some dirt jumps, become legendary worldwide, in one sport or another.  

In this blog I want to not only dig into the history of legendary spots, but find some new ones, and also look at the effects these spots have on action sports culture, and even mainstream culture later on.  That's a lot to dive into, but I'm now over 2,500 posts into my 14 year long blogging career, so I'm used to looking at subjects piece by piece, over a long period of time.  I have no real idea where The Spot Finder blog/concept is headed, and that's half the fun.  We'll find that out together.  In the meantime, this 13 minute video is a good primer on spots made famous by skateboarding, and how skaters, and other action sports people look at the urban environment, and the whole world, differently from average people.  Enjoy. 

Skateboarding and the City: A complete history- by Iain Borden, the book mentioned in the video.  Not a paid link.

The Endless Halfpipe of Umea, Sweden

The Endless Halfpipe of Umea, Sweden.  

Disclaimer

I didn't know about this until I searched "amazing skate spots" YouTube.  This appears to be an old logging flume, or possible just a aqueduct for spring floods, or something like that.  What it reminds me of is The Gauntlet from American Gladiators, which I actually did ride my bike in, when I was a crew guy on the show in the early 90's.  In any case, the "endless" halfpipe turned into a high banked metal ditch, then ends.  So it's not endless, but prety freakin' long.  

In any case, this looks like a fun place to skate or ride, if you make it to Umea, Sweden.  Umea is on the east coast of Sweden, a couple of hundred miles (or a whole bunch of kilometers) north of Stockholm.  The video is pretty funny.  These guys skate for half the video, then the local guy guides the other around the weird spots of the town.  Weird spots to ride and skate are all over the place.  That's kind of the point of this blog.  

The Jinx Bank, Eddie Roman, and the birth of BMX wall rides

This is the first documented BMX street contest, Ron Wilkerson's 2-Hip Meet the Street in Santee, California, in the spring of 1988.  Curb Dog Dave Vanderspek actually held a street contest in NorCal earlier, that most of us SoCal riders never heard about.  But Santee was the first BMX street event to show up in the magazines, and be documented on video.  This is my edit of the contest, part of the 2-Hip BHIP video of the 1988 2-Hip contest season.  This was the first contest where BMX wall rides happened.  The first wall ride of the video is by Skyway rider Eddie Roman.  

Disclaimer

For the few months that I worked at Wizard Publications in 1986, I was roommates with two of my co-workers, Craig "Gork" Barrette, the editor of BMX Action, and Mark "Lew" Lewman, the assitant editor of FREESTYLIN'.  I moved to Redondo Beach from San Jose, landing in LAX with my Skyway T/A bike, a suitcase, $80.  At first I slept on the couch of their apartment, but after a couple of months, we got a three bedroom place , just across the city line in Hermosa Beach.  In the late summer and fall of 1986, if there wasn't a contest to go to, my Saturdays and Sundays usually began by cooking a huge plate of pancakes, which I would eat while watching Lew's copy of Powell Peralta's Bones Brigade II video, Future Primitive.  My favorite part was the Tommy Guerrero section, with that great Craig Stecyk quote at the beginning, "200 years of American technology has unwittingly created a massive cement playground.  It took the minds of 12-year-olds to realize its potential."  Street skating was just beginning to turn into a thing then, with photos, and the early video parts by Mark Gonzales, Tommy Guerrero, and Natas Kaupas, in particular.  

At FREESTYLIN', editor Andy Jenkins was an artist who had raced BMX, and a skater, heavily influenced by skateboarding and punk culture, which he brought to the amazing style and art direction that set FREESTYLIN' magazine apart from the other BMX mags.  So street skating was something we talked about at work on a regular basis.  In addition, freestyle skater Rodney Mullen practiced at The Spot, where we rode every night, when he was in California.  So as I rode and worked, despite being at a company publishing two BMX magazines, there was a big skateboard influence all around.  So after my huge plate of pancakes while watching Future Primitive on the weekends, I would grab my bike, and go ride solo all morning, and usually much of the afternoon.  I wandered around the Redondo Beach, Hermosa Beach, and Torrance area, just looking for cool stuff to ride, and sessioning alone.  This was something I really started doing a year before, after I moved from Boise, to San Jose.  Again I had a huge, unknown, urban area around me to explore on my bike.  I ranged all over the region, even riding over ten miles up to Venice Beach two or three times.

On one photo shoot for the magazines, driving photographer Windy Osborn and pro freestyler Ron Wilkerson, I drove us to a bike shop on Pacific Coast Highway (PCH), in Redondo.  They had a quarterpipe out back, where Ron did a brand trick he invented, the abubaca.  I took a wrong turn, trying to find the right alley, and caught a glimpse of this asphalt bank on the back of a store.  The little parking lot sloped down, and the bank went from nothing, to a steep, six foot high bank on the far end.  That logged into the back of my brain, and I drove on to find the bike shop.  A couple of weeks later, I remembered that bank, and spent a Saturday morning looking for it.  I forgot exactly where it was, but had a rough idea, wandered around, and finally found it.  

Within minutes, I realized that the steep end of the bank was a great place to launch up, and do a topside footplant on the stucco wall above.  After a half hour or so of sessioning, I snapped a pedal, and had to "scooter" my bike back home, pushing while standing on one pedal.  I tweaked my ankle a bit as well.  I told Gork and Lew about the bank, and they had both heard skaters talk of a cool bank in that area, but had never sought it out.  The next trip to ride it, I cracked my fork drop out, and had to replace my forks.  The third trip to it, Lew came along to see this spot I said was so amazing.  We had a good little session, but Lew wound up tweaking his ankle, a pretty good sprain.  He said something like, "Man, this bank is a jinx."  With that, The Jinx Bank got its name.  

I just found it on Google Maps, while writing this post, it's located on the back of the building at 1312 PCH in Redondo Beach, now a restaurant and bar.  Many years ago, someone built an asphalt curb below the bank, making it pretty much unskatable and unrideable.  You could throw a board over the curb, but it just wasn't the same.  I last sessioned it in the 1990's, I think.  So that's part one of this story, how The Jinx Bank was refound by me, and got its name from Lew.  R.L. Osborn, who had his office Wizard, told me he'd heard of the bank from skaters, but Larry's Donuts Bank was a better place to ride at the time, when kickturns were the main trick that he, Bob Haro, and Mike Buff were working on.

Keith Treanor with a huge wall ride fakie, in 1990, in Garden Grove, California.  There was a four foot high ramp below him.  

I first saw a wall ride on a BMX bike in the fall of 1986.  One of my jobs at Wizard Publications was to drive Windy, our photographer, to photo shoots.  We did a shoot that fall with Dave Curry in Huntington Beach.  Dave was a really innovative rider from the U.K., and directed us around to several spots in H.B..  As dusk was setting in, he directed me down an alley, not far from Huntington High school.  There was a tiny bank, about a foot high, next to a wall.  We got out, and Dave hit the bank like a little jump, and slapped both tires on the wall, about a foot up.  It blew my mind, and I told Windy we needed to get photos of it.  Being a veteran BMX photographer, she wasn't so impressed.  While he did the first wall ride I had seen or heard of, it was only about a foot up, and more of a tire slide.  Plus the light was terrible, and Windy had plans that evening, and we were already running pretty late.  Looking back, while it was innovative, the photo wouldn't have been near as cool as the one Eddie Roman got months later.  But I had to give Dave Curry props, because that was the first BMX wall ride I ever saw or heard of.  

Being the uptight dork that I was, I got laid off from Wizard Publications at the end of 1986, and went on to work at the AFA, editing their newsletter and doing other work.  Wizard hired a 17-year-old East Coast BMX/skater kid, Spike Jonze, which was a much better fit for the magazines.  As everyone knows, that worked out well, and he's been ridiculously successful since.  

Meanwhile, A couple of street riding articles in FREESTYLIN' got riders everywhere looking around at their urban environment, and riding what they found.  The NorCal guys from San Francisco were always very street oriented riders, led by Dave Vanderspek, Maurice Meyer, and the other Curb Dogs.  Skater Tommy Guerrero, and his brother Tony, were members of the Curb Dogs, as well.  So street riding and skating was always a thing in the Bay Area.  At the other end of California, several San Diego riders were also really pushing street riding progression.  The main riders in 1986-1987 street riding there were Eddie Roman, Pete Agustin, and the Dirt Brothers, like Vic Murphy, Brad Blanchard, Ronnie Farmer, along with GT all around rider Dave Voelker, among others.  

Back then riders just went riding, shooting video wasn't a thing yet, though the rider-made video movement was just around the corner.  So there isn't any good video of these guys readily available from 1985-1987.  But you can see some of Eddie Roman's BMX freestyle innovation in this video from 1990, and in Ride On, starting at 3:47, a video Eddie produced in 1992.  In the mid to late 1980's, footplants, sprocket grinds, and doing 180's to fakie on or off obstacles were key parts of street riding.  Peg grinds had not been invented yet.  While BMXers had been jumping curbs and bunnyhopping things since the early 1970's, BMX street began to evolve, with more elaborate tricks using urban obstacles being invented day after day.  Riders looked at curbs, banks, ledges, and wondered, "What can I do with this urban object on my bike?"  

This is my Sharpie Scribble Style drawing of Windy Osborn's photo of Eddie Roman, doing the first wall ride to appear in a BMX magazine, in 1987.  

The photo of Eddie Roman doing the first wall ride was shot at the Jinx Bank,  The story I heard years ago was that Eddie Roman was up in Torrance to do a photo shoot, and Lew suggested they go to the Jinx Bank, the best bank to wall in that area.  The result was a great photo of Eddie taking off the middle part of the bank, and riding on the wall, over the sketchy pieces of rebar sticking out.  Across the world, BMXers opened that issue of FREESTYLIN', and said, "Holy shit! He's riding on the wall!"  Or something close to that.  That photo changed bike riding forever, in an instant, suddenly walls were in play, and everyone started looking for banks to walls to learn wall rides.  

When I first wrote this post, I skipped the wall ride fakie aspect.  Months after the photo above of Eddie, Craig Grasso added to the progression with the first fakie wall ride post.  He's in the video above of the Santee contest.  In early 1989, the Godfather of BMX, Scot Breithaupt had sold a bicycle sports TV series to ESPN.  In typical Scot fashion, he didn't have all the shows planned out, and he happened to be editing the shows at night at Unreel Productions, where I worked.  I got paid to hang out and make sure he didn't "borrow" too much of our video footage, or anything else.  One night he said he needed an idea for the next show.  It took 20 minutes, but I talked him into doing a street riding show, which was the new thing then.  We held the contest the next Saturday, and 9 days later the show was edited, and aired on ESPN.  That's about 15 days from idea to finished TV show on TV.  If you've ever worked in TV production, you knows that's a ridiculous time schedule.  In that show, which became the first made-for-BMX street show ever, Craig Grasso and Pete Augustin were the only guys busting huge wall rides.  You can see them at 8:30 in this show.  This was about a year and a half after the Eddie Roman photo appeared, and six years before the X-Games debuted.  This show got the best ratings, by far, of all of the bike shows in Scot's series.  Kids across the country knew something cool when they saw it, and told their friends to tune in.  

Eddie Roman had a huge innovative influence on BMX freestyle in the 1980's and early 1990's, both as a rider and as a video producer/editor.  But this photo of the first wall ride in a magazine was one of his biggest contributions.  That influence can easily be seen in the video embedded above, of the Santee contest in 1988, where nearly everyone was doing wall rides.  In less than a year after that first wall ride photo, fakie wall rides were invented, but no photo in any magazine showed a wall ride more than two feet high.  The 2-Hip Meet the Street at Santee in 1988 was the first time most of the top emerging street riders came together, at a street location with huge dirt banks to a wall and other obstacles, to see what everyone else could do.  The Santee contest also changed BMX freestyle forever.  Dave Voelker was doing 8-9 foot high wall rides at that spot, guys tried one footers and can-can's, and Todd Anderson did those cool fakie wall footplants.  Then English rider Craig Campbell raised the bar even higher, doing the first wallride to 360., blowing everyone's mind.  All that happened with in a year of the first wall ride photo.  BMXers have continued to push the level of wall rides ever since, now 35 years out from the Eddie Roman photo at the Jinx Bank.

Here's a great compilation of BMX wall rides from the last 15-20 years, thank you Baskett Case, whoever you are, for taking the time to put all these into one video.  

In the few years since this video was posted, there are even more huge and technical wall rides have happened.  Two standouts in my mind are Dakota Roche,  for both burly and technical wall rides in Native Land IV, and Sebastian Keep, going huge, with insane gaps to wall rides in Walls, and other videos. 

I started this post with the story of me finding the Jinx Bank to remind all riders out there that you may not be the guy or gal who does 15 foot gaps to wall rides, but that anyone can find cool new spots to ride.  I just happened to be the mediocre rider that rediscovered an old skaters bank in the BMX footplant era.  Riding was evolving, and I had many great sessions, doing fooplants on the Jinx Bank wall.  I moved on, but the bank was then in play, Lew, Gork, Craig Grasso, and other Redondo area locals knew it was there.  That just happened to be the wall they took Eddie Roman to for the first wall ride photo.  So even if you're not a Josh Stricker or Dakota Roche or a Sebastian Keep, you can still go exploring and find places that may wind up helping the sport evolve somewhere down the line.  Most of the great street spots in all the videos we watch were not found by top pros.  Regular riders are finding new spots to ride or skate all the time, and bringing them into play in the action sports world   Anyone can help BMX freestyle, and other action sports evolve and progress.  So that's my story behind the very first wall ride photo, a picture that changed bike riding forever, and continues to be built upon by today's riders.  

Classic Skateboard Spots- The Chain Bank in San Diego

While I knew a few 90's skaters, being a Huntington Beach BMX local, I'd never heard of the Chain Bank until I ran across this video a few months ago.  In this clip, Rob Dyrdek narrates as we see the day where the cat-like Tom Penny unloads trick after trick, and shuts the place down... in one session. 

Disclaimer 

What Rob Dyrdek calls the Chain Bank in the video above, is also known as the Shelter Island Manny Pad, and is listed in this list of top San Diego skate spots, on The Swellbow website.  Shelter Island is in the Point Loma area of San Diego, basically across the harbor from the Navy Base, or 3-4 miles straight south of Sea World San Diego, for us non-locals.  Shelter Island comes up on Google Maps, and it looks like the bank is near the boat ramp, from the satellite view. One site says there is now a guard rail where the chain used to be, which would make it much harder, maybe nea rimpossible, to skate now.   

From what I can gather, this was a mid1990's skate spot, and despite Tom Penny's epic session back in the day, this compilation video has several other really solid tricks on the bank, by skaters like Pat Duffy, Rob Dyrdek, Marc Johnson, Bastien Salabanzi, and more.  

Nothing... at all, comes up for BMXers riding there, which surprises me, since there are plenty of BMXers, particularly older ones, who love banks.  San Diego was a major force in early BMX street in the 1980's.  But I've seen no sign of BMX riders sessioning this spot back in the day.  If I run across any, I'll update this post.   

Unknown spot: The Westminster Full Pipes-

There's one sound that totally sticks in my head from the few times I got to ride Pipeline skatepark.  That sound was when I was sitting on my bike by the roll in to the full pipe, and Steve Alba would come up the the wall right there, doing a huge, wheel squawking frontside carve, over vert, in the full pipe.  There's nothing like that sound.  This video above is a hilarious history of full pipe skateboarding, with Jeff Grosso, Steve Alba, and Duane Peters. This is a must watch.  RIP Jeff Grosso.

Disclaimer

Being the homeless bum I am right now, I'm not going to make a trek to take a photo of these pipes, because I don't have a car.  To the best of my knowledge, even Steve Alba doesn't know the Westminster full pipes exist.  First of all, they're small, about 8 to 9 feet diameter.  There are four full pipes, that I know of, in Westminster, California.  You can  see the ends of two of them from the corner of Westminster and Bolsa, right off the 405, by the Westminster Mall.  Go out on the sidewalk, in front of Chase Bank, and you can look down into the ditch and see two small full pipes.  But those aren't the ones I rode in the early 90's.  

While living in the P.O.W. House, on Iroquois Street, in the early 1990's, I found two other full pipes, the same size, 8 to 9 feet in diameter.  Those two had a much better access route.  If you watch the video above, there's a tiny metal full pipe at the very end, just a little section of pipe, that's about the same size as these.  So you can't carve high up the walls, like a 14, 16, or 20 foot diameter full pipe.  But these are still fun if you sweep out any debris, and roll down the length of them, carving back and forth on the walls.  You can air out the end, too.  I rode these a handful of times in about 1992-1993, while living in the P.O.W. House (Pros Of Westminster).  While I lived in a house with a bunch of top pro BMX riders at the time, nobody ever wanted to go ride these pipes.  So I had a few solo sessions in them.  I thought about putting a bunch of boxes in one, as crash pads, and trying to barrel roll it, like ride a corkscrew line through it.  There are definitely riders today who could do that.  But back then it seemed nuts.  I never got motivated to find a bunch of cardboard boxes, drag them to this location, and try it.  So that never happened.

Here's how you find two Westminster full pipes that I did ride.  There are actually four pipes, all parallel to each other as they go underground.  The two in the middle are circles, and the other two are about six foot high ovals.  Those might be fun to skate.  But they were too small to ride a BMX bike in.  Using your GPS, find 13722 Hefley Street in Westminster, California.  It's real close to Springdale and the 405, but back in the neighborhood.  Head south to the big ditch.  There is a fence to jump, so it's trespassing to go into these.  Use your own discretion there.  But in that ditch, you'll see the ends of the four pipes, two circles, two ovals.  There's a truck ramp down into the ditch, so access is pretty easy.  

These are not big like Baldy Pipe, at 14'5" according to the video above, or the old or new Pipeline skatepark pipes, at 20 feet in diameter.  It's not the same kind of pipe skating or riding, with huge wall carves.  But they are pretty fun, and they're a short drive from Huntington Beach skatepark, and the beach itself.  So here's another one of my old spots that no one knows about.  Like the Studio City Monter Wall that I showed you in a previous post, these pipes have never been in a bike or skate magazine photo or video, as far as I know.  To get you amped to go skate or ride, here's a vintage Salba section from the Santa Cruz video, Wheels Of Fire, including him shredding Pipeline Skatepark.  

Classic skate spot: The China Banks- San Francisco

For over 35 years, the China Banks have been skated up in San Francisco.  It's a legendary spot, skaters around the world and across generations have seen photos and video from there.  Here's the story of the China Banks, courtesy of Thrasher magazine.  This 28 minute mini-doc speaks for himself.  

Disclaimer

Looking for a new project, as we were coming out of the Covid era in the last couple of months, I ran across this video.  What struck me is that it's a short documentary about a skate spot, a location.  There have been documentaries in skateboarding, with Stacy Peralta's 2001 Dogtown and Z-Boys leading the way, back in 2001.  Mark Eaton's Joe Kid on a Stingray told the story of BMX racing and freestyle.  Steve Rocco's World Industries story was told in The Man Who Souled the World.  Later Stacy Peralta did  Bones Brigade: An Autobiography.  But this China Banks video above, was the first solid documentary I've seen about a skate spot.  Not only is this just a great video. but as a blogger, and video guy back in the day, I thought, "these sports are old enough now that spots, locations, have their own stories to tell now."   That thought kind of stuck with me.  

Anyone who skated or rode bikes, or any action sport, hears about, and sessions, different spots, some local, and some that are well known in that sport, that world.  And some spots just take on a life of their own.  Kenter School Banks.  H.B. Pier Bank.  Baldy Pipe. Camp 4 at Yosemite.  Joshua Tree. Pipeline Skatepark.  Kona Skatepark.  Venice Beach.  Embarcadero.  Calabassas Jumps.  Brooklyn Banks.  The Spot in Redondo Beach.  Posh.  Hueco Tanks.  Sheep Hills.  Ocean Beach.  Whistler.  Mount Baker/Batchelor. Hollywood High Rail.  El Toro.  BMXer's skaters, snowboarders, climbers, and the rest, all have stories of their favorite spots.  Many also have stories of a trek to some well known spot, like Baldy Pipe, or wherever.  

This documentary about the China Banks made me think of all the other spots out there, and all the stories people have of all the spots.  At the same time, I had just taken a break from 5 1/2 years of scraping by with my Sharpie Scribble Style, mostly while homeless, I've been looking for another way to make a living, using my weird collection of creative skills.  I really suck at a lot of aspects of creative work, but I've become a good, if not profitable, blogger, and a few other things.  I've been looking for a new direction.  

As I said in the third post, a few days ago, I was sitting under a bridge, as a homeless guy, getting out of the heat, looking at this bank no one skates or rides, across the road.  The pieces fell together in my head.  Maybe it's time to cover the spots themselves.  This video of the China Banks, above, was part of that equation, I've watched it 4 or 5 times now.  It showed me that a spot, a location, can have a great story itself.  So I'm getting this blog going with several of the documentaries that already exist, compiling them with some of my own thoughts here and there.  I'll throw in a few streets spots I've stumbled across, as well as checking out skateparks and other riding spots. 

There are websites that tell people where some of the street spots are in places, and there are guides to where the skateparks are located.  I'm going to collect stories from spots in multiple sports, and throw some art spots and other stuff in here and there, and we'll see where this all goes.  One thing us Old School Has Been/Never Was BMXers, skaters, snowboarders, and others know from experience, starting down a direction that you're stoked on can, and often does, lead to things you could never imagine at the start.  So... Thanks for checking out this blog.  Where is this leading?  I don't know either, that's half the fun.

Classic Skate Spot: "The Ashtray"- Murdy Park skatepark in Huntington Beach

 

In her early days, while leading the way for women in street skating in the late 1990's and early 2000's, Elissa Steamer was a local at The Ashtray, and nearby Oceanview High School.  The Ashtray is not in this clip of her, but there are a couple of shots from Oceanview, which is a block away. 

Disclaimer

First, a little skate history.  There's no consensus on who invented the first skateboard, one prominent theory says it was a bored surfer in San Diego in about 1958.  A 2 X 6, and some steel roller skate wheels, and he could go "sidewalk surfing" when the waves were flat. The "Devil's Toy" was born.  The start of skateboarding was probably something like that.  The first big wave of skate popularity was in 1965-1966, and skateboarding looked like this.  The quick fad of corporate interest faded, and skateboarding went underground. 

In the early 1970's, skating moved to downhill speed runs, wheelies, slaloms, and carving banks, led by guys like Bruce Logan, among many others.  That led to the second big wave of popularity, around 1975-1980.  Again, skateboarding became a fad to large toy companies, a way to make a quick buck for a couple of years.  I was one of those 70's kids who started skating during that fad, in the tiny town of Willard, Ohio, in 1976, in my case.

Officially called the Murdy Park skatepark, this is the first public skatepark in California, built in 1993 or 1994.  It quickly got dubbed "The Ashtray," because it was so small, and kind of looked like an ashtray from the 1970's.  The bank was kinked, with a cracks right in front of it, but it still got skated... a lot.  This little park had ot prove the concept that public skateparks were a good idea.  No one died there, the idea worked, and this little skatepark made every other public skatepark in California possible.  #steveemigphotos

 

But out in Southern California, where the sport was centered, a group called the Z-Boys, the Zephyr Surf Shop skate team out of Venice Beach, along with Duante Peters and a few others down in Orange County, discovered empty swimming pools were a great place to skate.  This led to the first wave of skateboard parks in the mid 1970's, and a new aspect of skating, vertical walled pools, concrete waves that never moved, that could be "surfed" on skateboards, like Tony here in Marina Del Rey in 1978.  Suddenly skateparks became a viable business in Southern California, and select places across the United States, and a few foreign countries. The boom surged for a while, but then began to fade in the early 1980's.  One by one, the skateparks of the second wave of skateboarding closed down.  

By the mid-1980's, only two were left in Southern California, Pipeline Skatepark in Upland, and Del Mar Skate Ranch in Del Mar (north of San Diego).  In addition to skateparks pushing the evolution of skateboard vert riding, BMX bike riders in the mid-1970's realized skateparks were fun on bikes, as well.  Bob Haro is credited with inventing BMX freestyle, about 1977, and by 1985, Eddie Fiola, Brian Blyther, Mike Dominguez, and a few others, took BMX vert riding to a new level in the skateparks.  

Vert skating and bike riding both moved largely to halfpipes for contests and demos, because it's really hard to take a concrete skatepark on the road to do demos.  First Del Mar closed, and then in late 1988, Pipeline Skatepark, the last California Skatepark closed, and a few months later, in 1989, was eaten by the excavator.  

 

This curved ledge/wall has seen some serious use in the last 26-27 years.  There are much better skateparks around, but sessions still happen at The Ashtray.  It's just north of Warner, on Goldenwest, in Huntington Beach.  #steveemigphotos

 

During that same period, in the third wave of skateboarding, in the late 1980's, Mark Gonzales, Tommy Guererro, and Natas Kaupas took skateboarding back to the streets in a new way, taking Rodney Mullen's flat ground ollie, kickflip, and other freestyle tricks, to new terrain.  Street skating began growing as vert skating faded.  Pool skating and BMX went underground, and was banished in California to empty backyard pools and the Nude Bowl, way out in the desert.  

As luck would have it, I was working at Unreel Productions, the video company for Vision Skateboards, one of the "Big 5" skateboard companies of the late 1980's.  A handful of then Old School skateboarders, including a few at Vision, had a plan.  They wanted public skateparks to become a thing.  The time had come for free, open all the time, public skateparks.  They tried to talk the city of Costa Mesa, where Vision was located, into building one.  But Costa Mesa, like all cities, was worried about liability.  They didn't want to get sued for millions of dollars, because some skater fell and broke his arm.  

So before public skateparks could happen, those Old School skaters had to get a state law passed so that cities couldn't be sued for liability at skateparks.  That process took several years.  Then they had to talk a city into building a skatepark.  Then they had to talk the city into funding that skatepark, and actually get it built, and see if a public skatepark could work ( in the eyes of city leaders, we all knew it would work).  

I think it was about 1993 by the time the first public skatepark in California was built.  That was this skatepark, The Ashtray, in Murdy Park, officially at 7000 Norma drive in Huntington Beach, near the corner of Goldenwest and Warner.  Without this sketchy little park paving the way (literally), none of the other public skateparks in all of California would have happened.  So if you ever make it to Huntington Beach, go to The Ashtray, snap and ollie, and say thanks.  We thought it was going to get turned into a duck pond by now.  It's not great, but it's cool it still exists.

The most skatable part of The Ashtray, this bench been ground by a lot of legends of skating, from Ed Templeton and Elissa Steamer, to dozens of others.  It's waiting for you.  #steveemigphotos

 

What exactly did this little skatepark, The Ashtray, open the way for?  All of this skating and riding at public California skateparks, and a lot more:

 

Andy Anderson at Venice Beach skatepark 

 

Tucker Smith (blue helmet) and friends at Laguna Niguel skatepark 

 

Omar Hassan on all kinds of concrete (including public parks) 

 

Etnies/Lake Forest skatepark

 

Lyn Z Adams Hawkins (pre-Pastrana era)

 

 Christian Hosoi and Duane Peters at Lake Cunningham skatepark (San Jose)

 

Jesse Gregory at Costa Mesa (?) skatepark 

 

San Clemente skatepark locals 

 

The biggest public skatepark in California 

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MTB trails and urban free riding in Japan- Ayato Kimura

You Tube tossed this video at me, first thing this morning.  Great MTB freeride video featuring Ayato Kimura, from Japan, who I've never heard of, until now.  It starts with some trails riding then jumps into urban free ride and trials riding.  Tight and fast paced, good solid mountain bike video to get you amped to go ride.  The spots are somewhere in Japan, ask Ayato if you're over there.  

Disclaimer

After seeing this video on YouTube, then putting out this blog post, first thing this morning, I went back to Ayato's YouTube channel, Ayato Kimura, and watched everything on his channel.  There are a couple of shorts and five longer videos, from before the one above.  This kid in Japan is only 17-years-old, he's a huge fan of Fabio Wibmer, and he has improved a lot in the past several months.  His earlier videos are more of rough cuts, often with a few tries at a trick.  He blends skills to ride trails at speed, jump big, and full blown MTB and 20 inch trials riding.  He's also got some major huevos, and does a couple of amazing gap jumps in the earlier videos.  This video above, "Keep it Wild," is his first professionally produced video, and, like I said above, it's incredible.  It looks like he just got sponsored by Specialized Japan, in the past month or two, probably, while still in high school.

Ayato Kimura appears to be a young and hungry rider who will blow up in the next couple of years to a Danny Macaskill or Fabio Wibmer level.  He's going big and doing tech already, and he's got some incredible terrain to practice on in his hometown area.  Keep an eye on this kid.  

There will be new bike, skate, and art spots in the blog... like this secret place- The Monster Wall

The secret Monster Wall.

Disclaimer

This is a completely unknown spot, that I found and used to ride my bike on, in the early 1990's.  Location is a secret.  To the best of my knowledge, this wall has never been in a magazine photo or ANY action sports video.  But I just wanted to let people know that there will be new, and virtually unknown, bike and skate spots on this blog, not just posts about classic old spots.  This is the Monster Wall, it's at least 25 or 30 feet high, and pretty bumpy.  But ridable.  In the 90's, I could get about 6 1/2 high on the slightly undervert Blues Brothers Wall in Huntington Beach, at my peak.  That wall is quite a bit steeper than this one.  I don't think I ever got more than 4 feet up this thing, maybe 3 1/2.  It's gnarlier than it looks.  Stay tuned for more new and little known spots as this blog progresses...  

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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Why am I doing a blog about bike, skate, art, action sports, and other spots?

This is me, Steve Emig, carving tile in the Nude Bowl, in 1990.  Still from my 1990, self-produced BMX freestyle video, The Ultimate Weekend.  I couldn't air to save my live, but I loved carving around this pool.

Disclaimer

Spots

Baldy Pipe.  Kenter School Banks.  Golden Gate Park.  Pipeline Skatepark.  Del Mar Skatepark.  The Embarcadero.  Angelo's Drive-in.  The Dish.  The China Banks.  The Spot in Redondo Beach.  The Huntington Beach Pier. The P.O. Curb.  The Jinx Bank.  Colossus.  The "U."  Hidden Valley.  The Nude Bowl.  Posh rails. Sheep Hills.  The Towne Street Ramp.  The Brooklyn Banks.  Huntington Beach High School.  Burnside.  FDR.  Love Park.  El Toro.  Whistler/Blackcomb.  These are a just few of the BMX, skateboard spots, and one MTB/snowboard spot, that became known, many known worldwide, in the 1980's and 1990's.  A few of them are still around today.  

As BMX freestyle and skateboarding evolved in the 1980's and 1990's, and especially when street skating and street riding exploded, obscure places, where people rode and skated, started becoming famous in our weird little worlds, thanks to magazine photos, and later, videos.  A curb.  A banked piece of asphalt or concrete.  A ledge.  A set of stairs.  An empty swimming pool.  BMX jumps on an unused piece of somebody else's property.  A parking lot.  A brick area along the bike path by the beach.  Some of these places, that were built for one purpose, but happened to be a cool place to ride or skate, started becoming famous.  And not just famous in the neighborhood or town, but nationwide... worldwide.  

Wall ride over my sister Cheri's head, the Blues Brothers Wall in Huntington Beach, 1990.  

Action sports weren't really sports, much of the time.  There were contests in all of them, but the contests were just a small part of these activities.  As us 1970's, 1980's and 1990's kids got more and more into actions sports, we started looking at things differently.  We started looking at our world differently.  I remember one time in the 90's when I was riding in a car with Keith Treanor, John Povah, and John's girlfriend at the time.  She was driving us somewhere, and suddenly one of us said, "Whoa, check out that bank!"  The girlfriend flipped out, "Stop it!" she scramed, "I'm so fucking tired of hearing you guys get all excited about a curb or a bank or a ledge.  It's a fucking bank!  So what! So fucking what!"  We all shut up and looked at each other, then started laughing, which made her even more pissed off.  After of years of riding BMX, and a bit of skating, that's how we saw the world, potential places to ride or skate.  Everywhere we went, everywhere we looked, were things we might be able to ride.  Action sports change the way we looked at our environment.  

Heavily skated bench at "The Ashtray," Murdy Park skatepark, in Huntington Beach, 2021.  This was the first free public skatepark built in California in the 1990's, testing the idea to see if public skateparks were a good idea.   Luckily for skaters, no one died here, and dozens more free skateparks have been built in California since.  #steveemigphotos 

The idea of spots started in the surfing world, where they scouted out the best breaks and which swells produced good waves at which places.  Some days some breaks were good, other days other surf spots were pumping.  That's why Surfline exists now.  It was originally a 900 number, telling SoCal surfers where the good waves were.  Technology evolved, and now Surfline tells the world where the great swells and waves are going to be.  Then came skateboarding in the 1960's, Early skaters looked for smooth concrete or asphalt, and then good asphalt down a hill for slaloms.  Then they found banks, ditches, and later empty swimming pools were great places to skate.  Early BMXers looked for scraps of land to build jumps.  Things just kept evolving.  As riding and skating progressed, they looked for different types of places to session.  As these sports that weren't really sports grew, surfing, BMX, skating and other spots began to get famous.  

We would see a place in a photo that looked fun to ride, and we'd want to travel to go ride there.  I rode in a freestyle contest in the town square in Whistler, British Columbia in 1986, when many mountain bike riders still rode single speed bikes.  I rode at Golden Gate Park, The Embarcadero, The Spot in Redondo Beach, Pipeline Skatepark, the Huntington Beach Pier Bank and the flatland area under Maxwell's (now Duke's), Magnolia Jumps, The Brooklyn Banks, Sheep Hills when it was new, and The Nude Bowl.  I not saying I rode these places well, but I got to ride them.  I rode the original Combi Pool at Pipeline Skatepark, and a decade later, I rode the new Combi Pool at the Van's Skatepark in Orange, when bikes were still allowed.  For just over 20 years, from 1982 to 2003, I rode my BMX bike for a couple hours or more, nearly every single day.  I also got into bouldering, low altitude rock climbing, without ropes, in the 1990's, and spent many hours at Stony Point in Chatsworth, The Beach in Corona Del Mar, and the Anarchy Wall in Huntington Beach, as well.  Then I became a taxi driver, got fat, and got sidetracked away from action sports.  

Chris Lashua (back) and Eddie Fiola, practicing wedge ramps stalls in Whistler, British Columbia in 1986.  They were doing shows in Vancouver, and heard there was a contest in Whistler, so they took a break, drove up, and hung out for a couple of days.  This photo appeared in the December 1986 issue of FREESTYLIN' magazine.  What's the bike scene like in Whistler these days?  Here's the Red Bull Joyride 2022, that happened there a month ago.  #steveemigphotos

As those early years went by, I started to look at the action sports from a Big Picture viewpoint, being a geek, and I saw there were larger trends playing out.  The action sports wasn't just a bunch of dirtbag kids jumping bikes or skateboarding in empty swimming pools.  There were larger trends that we were all a part of.  I began to see how groups of riders formed scenes, and some scenes evolved faster than others.  Over the years, some of the scenes expanded.  I also was fascinated by how a curb, like say, the P.O. Curb in Huntington Beach, became famous in the skate world.  As time went on, some spots, like The Embarcadero in San Francisco, became world famous by one trick, like Mark Gonzales ollying the big gap that became The Gonz Channel.  Cities around the world spend millions of dollars intentionally trying to create things that will attract thousands of tourists, and millions of dollars a year.  Disneyland and other amusement parks are a great example.  

Yet in the action sports world, in the early 90's, I started seeing guys flying over a fucking ocean, sleeping on our couches and floors to save money, and then wanting to ride the jumps at Sheep Hills, or The Nude Bowl, have a flatland session with us locals at the Huntington Beach Pier.  That continued to blow my mind.  Riders and skaters were traveling long distances to go to a curb, a bank to wall, a skatepark, a set of stairs.  BMX, skate, and other spots became action sports tourist attractions, totally by accident.  

And I've done it, too.  I got sent to New York City in 1989 to shoot video of Ron Wilkerson's 2-Hip Meet the Street comp at the Brooklyn Banks.  Did I take my bike?  Hell yeah, I did.  I had the best BMX weekend of my life, and learned tailhip footplants on a wall on the Brooklyn Banks.  In the 1980's, and even more in the 1990's, the guys I rode with, we'd pack up and go ride a ditch a hour away that wasn't much different than the ditches nearby.  Or drive two hours to carve through a little full pipe somebody heard about.  If you ride or skate seriously, you know what I'm talking about.  Spots became known, then began to draw people from farther away to ride or skate them.  There are BMX, skate, surf, rock climbing, mountain bike, and other spots that have their own stories now, because they've been around for so long.  There are even a few documentaries about riding and skating spots.  

For a bunch of reasons, I got pushed away from the action sports world for the last couple of decades.  Life just got weird on several levels, and deported me to the Eastern Seaboard for a decade.  I finally made it back to Sothern California in 2019.  No one wants ot hire a former taxi driver, so getting back to making a good living has been hard.  I've scraped by with my Sharpie Scribble Style artwork, but that's not enough to being me back to a functional working life.  

As an old guy who is now fat, ugly, currently homeless, but a good blogger, I was thinking about how much BMX, skateboarding, and action sports have changed since my early days in 1982-83-84.  When you're young, the point is to get better, get sponsored, and hopefully, invent some tricks or moves, maybe win some constests, and add to the progression of these sports.  Maybe make some decent money, as well.  

But when you're middle aged, like us 50-something Gen X types, these sports look different.  You can start a bike or skate company, a website, a clothing company, a YouTube channel, or some other business.  You can help get a local skatepark built, or put on contests.  For me, from my first zine, through 7 magazines and a newsletter, 15 videos, and now over 25 blogs, I've been a media guy.  Now I'm fat, have no work history, and a less than ideal living situation.  A "real" job that pays enough to live on just isn't going to happen.  

Tucker Smith blasting a double grab Superman at Boozer Jam 2022 at Sheep Hills, in Costa Mesa, California.  #steveemigphotos

So that leaves some kind of media business, and my Sharpie artwork, as ways to make a living again.  With this in mind, I started asking myself what I call the Two Great Questions.  1) What would be really fun to do?  2) What needs done that nobody is doing?  Then I added, 3) What can I do as an old guy, that will actually progress or add to these sports in some way?   What's next?  Where do these sports go from here?  With 20 years of action sports experience, and 56 years of life experience, what can I add to the mix?  Then I just went about my daily life for a few days, letting those questions percolate.  

A couple of days ago, I was sitting in the shade, looking at a cool bank across the street that no one ever rides or skates.  I thought of the other spots I know of in the San Fernando Valley, where I live now, that the BMX and skate worlds don't even know exist.  The idea just popped in my head, like the ideas for tricks, zines, videos, and blogs have in years past.  "Start a blog, and shoot photos and video of BMX and skate spots." The thought just popped into my head.  "Tell the story of classic spots, share other people's videos of cool spots, and then go find new spots."  The idea just began growing as I was sitting there.  So here's The Spot Finder blog, the first step in this idea.  We'll see where it goes from here.  That's the story.  Welcome to my next step in the action sports world.  And a reason to start losing weight and get my fat ass back on a bike and skateboard again.  

Big invert at the D.I.Y. World Championships 2018, put on by Steve Crandall of FBM Bikes and Chad at Powers Bikes in Richmond, Virginia.  Rider unknown (sorry).  #steveemigphotos