Evan Smith- Best of 2022 skating

There are plenty of great skaters, BMXers, and other riders out there that I've never heard of.  Evan Smith is a skateboarder I wasn't familiar with.  YouTube tossed this compilation video at me, and it's freakin' amazing, one of the best I've seen in years.  Big, tech, all kinds of obstacles and urban terrain.  If you like street skating, just watch it.  

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.    

The Frying Pan Skatepark

The frying pan skatepark in Wilkeson, Washington.

Disclaimer

According to the artist who designed it, John Hillding, this is the Bacon and Eggs Pop Art Skateable Sculpture, in Wilkeson, Washington.  I love this idea for a whole bunch of reasons.  John himself explains his idea behind it in this local news clip.  He comes from the world of Pop Art, where Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein are some of the best known names.  John Hillding has been into Pop Art since the late 1960's or early 1970's, and has created pieces for Bumbershoot, a Seattle based arts and music festival, over the years.  Bacon and Eggs is his most recent big idea, and the late skatepark designer  Mark Hubbard, of Grindline skateparks, did the design work to help bring John's vision to life.  After Mark's untimely death, Grindline built the sculpture/park.

Pop art never bowled me over, but like everyone, I've seen art by Warhol, Lichtenstein, Koons and others over the years, some of which made me take a second look, wondering about the thinking behind it.  Then, in the mid 1990's, I took a bus back east, then hopped in my sister's car, to help her move back to California after graduating college in North Carolina.  By the middle of Texas, we were bugging each other a bit from the long hours of driving each day.  Then, just outside Amarillo, we drove within site of the Cadillac Ranch, and decided to stop.  It was just an empty field with the back ends of all these old Cadillacs sticking out of the ground.  I had seen post cards of it, but didn't realize we were going to drive right by it.  My sister didn't really want to stop, she was on a schedule to get to San Jose, to move into her new place, and start work as a teacher.  But I talked her into stopping.

We were the only ones there when we walked out in the field from the parking area.  And we just started laughing.  There was no gift shop, no fee, no nothing, just all these old, graffiti'd, Cadillacs sticking up out of the ground.  Tired and road weary, we couldn't help but smile.  As we wandered around, a couple from Germany, and then a few other people, showed up.  We took some photos with the cars, and walked back to her car smiling, in a much better mood.  We just couldn't help it.  

Much more recently, a couple of years ago, I spent an hour walking around the Newport Beach Art Park, home of Bunnyhenge, shooting photos.  The circle of three foot high concrete rabbits is just so ridiculous, and I got a similar vibe as I did at the Cadillace Ranch.  

Bunnyhenge, Newport Beach, California (It's on Google Maps)

Yes, it's easy to say acts of absurdity, like these two places, and the Bacon and Eggs skatepark, are a waste of money.  You can say that they're stupid, and they're not "art."  I say, who the fuck cares?  Places like this have an affect on people when we go to them, and that's reason enough for them to exist.  It's just hard to walk away from them in a bad mood.  

Another thing I love about the Bacon and Eggs skatepark is that a little town, of less than 500 people, built the thing.  Wilkeson, Washington, decided to build that sculpture/skatepark, to put their home on the map, in our social media heavy, photo taking world.  And it worked.  There are several videos on YouTube of groups of skaters sessioning at the park, and Thrasher magazine even covered it.  

I think "skateable sculpture" and "BMX rideable sculpture," are great ideas, and I think we will see more of it in the future.  Personally, I'm waiting for an enlightened architect to design an action sports themed subdivision, and actual place for people to live where the sidewalks are half pump tracks, and there are jumps and grind rails and pools to ride all over the neighborhood.  Golf communities?  Yeah, hang up the plaid pants grandpa, lets design some kick ass places to live for THIS century.  

A little town none of us had ever heard of, Wilkeson, Washington, ante'd up and made a cool sculpture/skatpark.  Who's next in this line of progression?  That's what these sports are all about, right?  

One main theme of The Spot Finder blog/concept is to get my fat ass back on a bike before too long, and go check out lots of cool places to ride and skate, along with interesting art projects.  Bacon and Eggs is on my list of places I definitely want to visit someday.  How 'bout you?

This blog just hit 500 page views!

Let's hear it Homer.

I've tried at least 50 blog ideas in the last 15 years.  When I get going, 500 page views is the first milestone I really pay attention to.  It's a sign that someone out there is actually checking out what you're doing on a regular basis.  So thank you for checking this new idea out, I'm more stoked on this than any idea I've had for quite a while.  I'll do my best to keep this blog worth checking out.  

-Steve Emig

The Legacy of Baldy Pipe: BMX in full pipes

This segment is from episode 9 of the Road Fools BMX video series, produced by the Props crew.  Several top BMX riders seek out and find the famed Baldy Pipe, which hides in the mountains above the San Gabriel Valley, east of Los Angeles.  According to 23Mag, BMX database, Road Fools 9 riders were: Jim Cielencki, Kevin Porter, Nate Hanson, Bruce Crisman, Allistair Whitton, Matt Beringer, Brian Wizmerski, Pat Juliff, Brian Foster, Ryan "Biz" Jordan, and Greg Walsh. 

 

Jim does the crazy drop into the pit, Matt is the one riding cross legged.  Wizmerski is the guy with the long dreads.  I don't see Brian Foster in this clip.  In any case, this is one seriously talented group of Mid School BMX riders, sessioning Baldy Pipe in January of 2002.  

A few posts back, in this post, I dug into the history of Baldy Pipe, the place where full pipe skateboarding and bike riding began.  Built in the mid 1950's, an hour's drive, in traffic, east of L.A., the 14 1/2 foot diameter concrete full pipe was first found by locals in 1969.  A few kids were skating, and maybe riding bikes in it, as early as 1973.  You can check the video in that post with Steve Alba, to find out more.  For the BMX world, Baldy Pipe is what inspired Stan Hoffman, builder and owner of Pipeline Skatepark in nearby Upland, to create the first full pipe built intentionally for skateboarding.  The skaters told Stan to build it a bigger, so they made it a full 20 feet in diameter, and that set the Pipe Bowl at Pipeline apart from any other skatepark in the late 1970's.  

That's also the bowl where riders like Eddie Fiola, Brian Blyther, Mike Dominguez, Jeff Carroll, Steve McCloud, Rich Sigur, Tony Murray, Tim Rogers, and a few others, really set the stage for BMX vert riding.  The face wall of the Pipe Bowl, where riders did their biggest airs, had an 8 foot transition, and 4 feet of vert.  Most people forget about that four feet of vert.  It was there that these riders took the BMX aerial, as airs were first called, from about 3 to 5 feet out, and pushed the limits to 8, 9, maybe even 10 feet out of the bowl.  

Early BMX freestyle pioneer turned entrepreneur, Bob Morales, put on the first large contests there, under the banner of the American Skate Park Association (ASPA), in 1984.  The first "national" contest series in BMX freestyle, Bob turned trick riding from an activity into a somewhat organized sport.  Here's a clip of video producer Don Hoffman asking Bob Morales to explain safety gear and freestyle bikes, with Eddie Fiola, at Pipeline.  I wound up working for both Bob and Don a couple years later, and these two were key people in the early years of BMX freestyle.  

In 1984, Bob also put flatland and quarterpipe/kickturn ramp contests, and changed the organization to the AFA, the American Freestyle Association.  This era, 1983-84, is when BMX freestyle started blowing up in the BMX magazines, when FREESTYLIN' magazine debuted, and many of us across the U.S., and in the U.K., and Europe, first saw high airs in the Pipe Bowl at Pipeline, as well as Del Mar Skate Ranch.  

So full pipe riding has been a part of BMX vert since the really early days.  The original King of the Skateparks was Eddie Fiola, seen here riding the Pipe Bowl in 1985.  I believe that's the first 540 air in a contest in this video.  The other top riders pushing limits in the full pipe, that we have video of now,  were  Brian Blyther, Mike Dominguez, U.K. rider Craig Campbell, and the craziest of them all, Hugo Gonzalez.  Hugo did that fence plant out of the Pipe Bowl three years before wall rides were invented, for him, landing was always optional.    Before the word "huck," there was Hugo.  

You can see more footage of Pipeline Skatepark, including local shredder Jeff Carroll, who invented the no handed air, in this clip, at 4:32.  This BMX Plus! video, from 1985, also has some early BMX footage at Pipeline, featuring Steve McCloud, Brian Blyther, and Tony Murray, at 19:22 in the video.  Pipeline Skatepark was the last of the old, 1970's era skateparks in California, to close down, in 1988.  As luck would have it, I worked for Don Hoffman, whose dad owned Pipeline, so I got to ride some, and shoot video of pool skaters, in some of the last sessions in early 1989, after the park was closed, but before it got demolished.  Eddie Fiola and Brian Blyther came up for a couple of final sessions as well.  Here's someone's footage of Eddie Fiola after Pipeline closed.  You can see all the fences separating all the bowls were taken down by then, and that made a whole bunch of new lines possible, like the alley-oop flyouts Eddie is doing.  A new Skatepark in Upland was built in the 2000's, seen in this clip, and it has another 20 foot diameter full pipe, paying homage to the original Pipeline Skatepark.  But bikes are banned, as far as I know.  After Pipeline closed, there were still a few intrepid BMXers here and there who made the journey to ride Baldy Pipe, and other full pipes, in the many years since.  There are also a few full pipes built at skateparks, along with some capsule bowls that go a full circle.  Here are some of the best BMC full pipe videos I found online, some featuring Baldy Pipe, and some at other pipes.

Here's a Baldy Pipe trek video from a crew from New Jersey, it sounds like, in 2009.  This bunch of  BMX guys crossed the country, and wanted to see this spot, the big concrete hole in the mountain, firsthand, that they have heard about for years.  One thing I've learned from watching full pipe videos all day today is that most of them involve a crazy journey just to get to the pipe.  Yes, this is pretty obvious, since they are parts of dams or major waterworks projects, usually.  Yet there are at least a few rideable full pipes in skateparks, and they all have their roots in Baldy Pipe, sitting below the San Antonio dam, an hour east of L.A.   

Here's a five minute edit of a bunch of Southern California  BMX riders, on their mission to ride Baldy Pipe, in 2019 or 2020.  This is a pretty funny video, and I dig the peg/cess slide the one guy did in the pipe.  They even saw a tarantula on the way in, to spice up the trip.  That's one desert creature I haven't run into yet in my many years in California.

It's not just guys who seek out Baldy Pipe.  The young woman in this video isn't riding a BMX bike, but I don't think you'll mind.  She made the journey up to Baldy, with another way to session the big full pipe.  

This video section is one of the greats of all time, from 2005, Morgan Wade's section from Drop the Hammer.  In this insane section full of a million tricks, he double loops a skatepark full pipe, does some riding at Baldy Pipe, and then loops Baldy Pipe on his BMX bike at the very end.  This video put both Morgan Wade and Baldy Pipe on the the map for a whole bunch more peoplein the BMX world.   

Here's the Red Bull Full Circle video.  Sebastian Keep, Morgan Wade, Matt Berringer, and Mike "Hucker" Clark, in an elbow full pipe in the middle of nowhere, Wyoming.  Of course it's nuts.  Just watch.  

I found one BMX full pipe trip video from south of the border.  Anthony Panza and friends made the trip to this really smooth looking full pipe, somewhere outside of Tijuana, Mexico.  After arguing about whether to search for rattlesnakes and mountain lions, they get down to a session in the pipe.  This video is from a couple of years ago, a full 35 or 40 years after BMXers first sessioned Baldy Pipe, and the first top skatepark riders showed the world how to ride a full pipe, at Pipeline Skatepark.  After some van trouble, they guys made it up to a skatepark in Encinitas, California, to show off their street ridng skills.   

Sebastian Keep, or Bas as his friends seem to call him, is doing some of the most technical, huge and burly riding I've seen in recent years.  If you've seen his Walls videos, you know what I mean.  Looking up BMX pipe videos, I found this one, of Bas and a crew going into a gigantic full pipe, near Lisbon, Spain, about four years ago.  I just watched it, and it's freakin' nuts.  When you have some top level riders talking about helicopter air ambulances on video, if a rider misses a trick, you know it's serious shit going on.  This is one of the most dodgy BMX spot treks I've seen, ever, and the biggest full pipe anyone's found so far.    

In this post, early on in this blog, I wrote about a couple of still largely unknown full pipes, in Westminster, California.  They are only 8 or 9 feet in diameter, so you can't carve high up in them.  But I rode them a few times in the early 1990's, then pretty much forgot about them.  For you Old Schoo/Mid School BMXers, they were a short ride from the P.O.W. House, the Pros Of Westminster, where I lived for a bit in '92 and '93.  I found them, but no one else from the house wanted to go check them out.  Yet, we once packed up the cars and rode a nearly identical full pipe, and the ditch it fed into, nearly and hour and a half away.  In the small full pipes, the main thing to do is ride down them and carve back and forth, and maybe air out the end of the pipe.  Nothing super gnarly, but still fun. They're only a couple of miles away from where the Van's Huntington Beach Skatepark is now.

While never as popular as park and street riding, half a century after the first kid rolled a bike around in Baldy Pipe, a few riders are still going to great lengths to seek out, get to, and ride full pipes, in all kinds of crazy places.  There are some other BMX full pipe videos online, not to mention the parks with partial pipes and capsules out there these days.  There are a ton of skateboard full pipe videos as well, if this post got you interested in riding one.  Check the "History of Baldy Pipe" post, linked above, for links to several of those.  I learned a few things writing this post, found video of full pipes I've never heard of, and found more proof that Sebastian Keep is a freakin' alien or something.  He's just on another level, and is really pushing BMX, by doing really progressive riding in some of the most obscure places imaginable.  Thanks for checking out this post, there will be plenty more to come.   

Skate or Died Channel's look at classic street skating spots

A look at a handful of classic street skating spots by the Skate or Died YouTube channel. 

 

I'm not the only guy who has looked into the history of classic skate spots, though I haven't seen anyone do this for BMX spots.  In this video, this YouTuber shows us history behind El Toro, Wallenberg, the Carlsbad Gap, Hollywood High Rails, and the gigantic Lyon 25 stair set.  This video shows the best tricks landed down each, and a solid history of some of the best known street skating spots seen in skateboarding videos over the last 25 years.    

Federal Bikes- Brussels Remix

Brand new edit this morning, just popped up on YouTube.  Insane BMx street from the Fderal Bikes team in Brussels.