Cultoween 2022: Cultcrew's Halloween bash at Huntington Beach Skatepark

Here's Cultcrew's edit of their Halloween party at the Van's Huntington Beach Skatepark for 2022.  Happy Halloween everyone!  Whatever you do, don't click this link.  Or this one either.  

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.

Tom Cardy at New Haven Pump Track in the U.K.

British mountain bike rider Tom Cardy lays down some smoking laps, and a few tricks, at the Newhaven pump track, in the U.K.  

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I just went looking for an amazing pump track to show in this blog, and this popped up at the top on YouTube search results.  Tom calls Newhaven "the best pump track he has ever ridden."  OK, I've never been to the U.K., but I looked it up, and Newhaven is on the coast, south of London, and east of Brighton.  This video is from June 2020, so it's not brand new.  But he's doing several lines and transfers, manuals, and this video shows what pump track riding is all about.  With video and narration by what I assume is his girlfirend, Tom tears this track up, and even finds a place to backflip.  The video is shot with a mix of single camera footage, GoPro POV, and some drone footage as well.  Great video showing the potential of this well designed pump track.  His YouTube channel is "Tom Cardy," so check it out.  

Here's a shot of the pump track and skatepark at Newhaven pulled of Google Maps, to show you the layout.  

The Endless Halfpipe of Umea, Sweden

The Endless Halfpipe of Umea, Sweden.  

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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.  

Surfin' U.S.A- The original action sports song about surf spots

The 1963 song, "Surfin' U.S.A.," by The Beach Boys, is one of the classic songs of the surf music era of 1960's rock 'n roll.  This video is from Gabrielle Marie channel, and features the Hawkeye Girls, according to the watermark.  

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The surf sound rock of the 1960's spread the California beach lifestyle idea around the world, with The Beach Boys, Jan & Dean, Dick Dale and the Deltones, and others, creating a soundtrack to make backyards and family rooms around the world feel like the beach.  Or at least sound like it.  The music, and the era's "beach blanket" movies, spread the idea of surfing around the world from California.  The surf music was a part of the soundtrack of the later Baby Boomers teen years, and still played regularly on the radio for us Generation X kids coming up in the 1970's and early 1980's.  

It wasn't until I landed in Southern California at age 20, and started meeting a bunch of actual surfers, that I realized the song listed many of the SoCal surf spots.  Obviously, you get the idea in the song, but when you live in Southern California around surfers, it's different to hear people say, "I surfed Trestles this morning."  Those lyrics are suddenly part of your landscape.

"You'd catch 'em surfin' at Del Mar, Ventura county line, Santa Cruz and Trestle, Australia's Narabine, All over Manhattan, and down Doheny Way...Everybody's gone surfin', surfin' U.S.A.." -"Surfin' U.S.A" lyrics

For all of you in the rest of the world, not from Southern California, Del Mar is a city in north San Diego county, and hour and a half south of L.A.. Ventura county is the county north and west of Los Angeles county, the beach at the county line, Leo Carillo State Beach, is just west of Malibu.  Santa Cruz is a city in northen California, about 20 miles south of San Jose, and 50-60 miles south of San Francisco.  Narabene is an area north of Sydney, on the Southeast coast of Australia.  Manhattan is not the island in New York City, there's not a lot of surf there.  This Manhattan is an L.A. county beach city, about three miles south of LAX airport, and just north of Hermosa Beach, and Redondo Beach.  Doheny State Beach is on the south side of Dana Point, a city in southern Orange County, about 50 miles southeast of downtown L.A..  Doheny is a big long boarding beach, and also known for a blues and jazz festival held on the at the beach every year.  Trestles, another surf spot mentioned in the song, is a few miles farther south.  

If you grew up far inland, like me, and don't surf, also like me, you may wonder why they mention so many places in a surfing song.  The waves you see surfers riding in videos or photos, don't look like that every day.  Usually the waves are smaller at most breaks.  At any given time, there are weather systems, storms, and even hurricanes, thousands of miles away, sending pulses of energy through the water of the ocean.  These pulses are constantly changing, like ripples in a pond when you throw a few rocks in it.  When they hit the shore, these swells push the waves up a little higher than the normal waves.  Since these pulses, or swells, come from all kinds of different directions, they affect different beaches in different ways.  A swell from the west will make good shaped surfing waves at one beach, a southwest swell will pump other beaches, and a north swell will be good at still others.  So surfers in Southern California, or any coastal area, are constantly looking for info on where the swells are coming from, and which beaches will have the best waves on any given day.  

There's a company out of Huntington Beach, California that leads in this information, Surfline that keeps tabs on swells around the world.  When I first moved to H.B. in the 80's, Surfline was a 900 number that surfers would call to find where the surf was good in southern California, and it has evolved in to an amazing place for videos, info, and surf forecasting worldwide.  

Since this website is about action sports spots, I had to pay homage to the song from nearly 60 years ago, that taught the world names of several popular surf breaks. Surfing is one of the original action sports, along with mountainering, snow and water skiing, and motocross.  While I'm at it, I should mention that the Jan & Dean song, "Surf City," was written about Huntington Beach, my home for the better part of 20 years.  This particular video also qualifies as one of the first times skateboarding was ever on TV, as they roll off camera at the end.  43 years later, skateboarding has evolved a bit, here are some highlights from the 2006 Soul Bowl event, built right on the sand in Huntington Beach, during the big surf contest.  

What about the surfing?  Here's Kelly Slater on one of the rare days in Huntington Beach when there were big waves for the annual U.S. Open of Surfing.  Trestles, one of the spots mentioned in "Surfin' U.S.A.," has two areas, called Uppers and Lowers, by the surfers.  Here's footage of an epic day at Lowers, while some of the world's best surfers were there.  To fill this post out, here's some classic longboard surfing at Doheny Beach, this is the style of surfing made famous in Malibu and other spots in the 1960's.  I'll wind up this post with the most epic surf guitar song of all time, Dick Dale's "Miserlou."  Did you know this song inspired Quentin Tarantino to write the movie Pulp Fiction?  Yep, it's true, so now you know.  

For a ridiculous bonus beach song, here's Elvis Presley singing, "Do the Clam."  Really.  

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.