Here's a good look at the Grand Opening of the Gale Webb Action Sports Park, in Menifee, California. This video was put out by Rad BMX Builds. This event just happened, November 8th, 2022. The location is 26533 Craig Avenue, in Menifee. Menifee is out in the SoCal desert, about 60-70 miles southeast of Los Angeles, near Lake Elsinore.
Gale Webb has been known as America's Sports Mom since the 1980's. For decades her and her late husband Jim put on action sports shows all over the place, including weeks at a time at Knott's Berry Farm in Buena Park, California. Riders like Eddie Fiola, Martin Aparijo, Scott Freeman, and skateboarders Primo and Diane Desiderio were active riders in her early shows, along with dozens and dozens of top action sports athletes since.
I first heard of Gale Webb in 1985, when I saw a little photo of an woman doing a wheeler on a skateboard in a halfpipe, in Bill Batchelor's Shreddin' zine. Back then, the first story I heard about Gale was that she had survived a terrible skydiving accident, where her shoot didn't open until she was about 150 feet off the ground. Something crazy like that. She made a long, full recovery, and went on to compete in women's motocross for many more years. This was at a time when young kids were just getting into BMX freestyle's first wave, and the third big popularity wave of skateboarding. Gale could ride skateboards, rode motocross really well, and tried her hand at mountain bikes, which were also a new thing back then.
I interviewed Gale for the American Freestyle Association newsletter in 1987, riding my bike to Knott's Berry Farm, since I didn't have a car. She was putting on several BMX and skateboard shows a day there. As luck would have it, Primo and Diane Desiderio got stuck in traffic, and I filled in for the first show, doing a few tricks on my bike. The riders that day, as I recall, were Martin Aparijo, Scott Freeman, freestyle skater Andre' Walton, and a vert skater and BMX ramp rider. I don't think Eddie Fiola was there that day, though he often rode in her shows, when not on tour for GT. Gale was putting on shows like no one else in those days, BMX, skateboarding, inline skating, and occasionally vert roller skaters like Fred Blood and Duke Rennie. Even with all there is to do at Knott's, a major amusement park, her shows drew crowds of 200 to 500 people for every show. I doubt anyone in action sports has shown more kids these sports firsthand than Gale Webb's shows. So it's really cool to see her honored with a great action sports park named after her.
So far there's a BMX/MTB jumping park, a kids BMX park, and a pump track, which can be ridden by BMX and MTB bikes, scooters, and skateboards. I don't know if there's a skatepark at the park yet, it's so new, nothing shows up on Google Maps, but an empty field.
In this video I see Eddie Fiola, 80's BMX vert legend, and the very first King of the Skateparks. I saw 80's freestyler turned supercross announcer Dan Hubbard, as well as new school riders Mike "Hucker" Clark, and Tucker Smith, and I believe MTB rider Dylan Stark, who lives in the area, was there as well. I'm sure several other high level riders were there, those are just the ones I saw in the video above.
Skateboarding, BMX racing, and BMX freestyle all were invented in Southern California, but because land is so expensive, there are few bike parks and pump tracks in SoCal. There are great bike and skateparks all over the U.S. and the world now. So it's really cool to see a really good park opening here in Southern California, where these sports began. I'm sure there are many, many great sessions to come at this park.
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.
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.
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.
