Here's old school BMXer Rick Thorne with even older school skate legend Steve Alba at one of my favorite places in the world, The Nude Bowl. Way out in the SoCal desert, on a hillside past Palm Springs and overlooking Desert Hot Springs, there lies the remains of a nudist colony. Sometime in the late 1970's or early 80's, the naked people abandoned it. Somehow, skaters found it.
I started working on an old school BMX project today, and looked up some riders from BITD on You Tube. Much to my surprise, I found Rick Thorne's Pool Hunters. The bald guy in this clip looks vaguely familiar. Anyhow, I watched four different clips tonight, and this one at the Nude Bowl with pool skating legend Steve Alba reminded me of my sessions there. A blog post was inevitable. I even learned a few things about the pool I didn't know in this clip.
I first heard of the Nude Bowl in 1988, in my little cubby hole of a room at Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboards video company. The biggest part of my job then was dubbing copies of videos for people throughout the Vision world. People of all different jobs needed videos, mostly VHS copies, of different things, and I made those copies. I was also the tape librarian, so I made window dubs of all the raw footage that got shot, labeled the tapes, and organized them in the tape vault. One of the best parts of that job was that I got to watch raw footage that the skaters shot, usually a day or two after it happened. In those tapes, I first saw footage of this crazy pool out in the desert called the Nude Bowl, and several other skate spots. This was at a time when Del Mar skatepark closed, and the sole surviving skatepark in Southern California was Pipeline in Upland.
While I always sucked at riding ramps, and never could air much above coping, but I loved riding pools. Figuring out lines and carving pools was a blast, just pumping around at speed seemed one of the best things to do on a bike. I finally bought Mike Sarrail's old truck in '88, and managed to ride Pipeline five or six times right before it closed. Since I happened to work for Don Hoffman, whose parents owned Pipeline, I was able to ride Pipeline a bunch more times after it closed. I loved riding pools from then on, even though I never rose above coping.
Sometime in late '88 or early '89, I got the job of taking a couple of the Vision skaters out to the Nude Bowl for a session and a low key video shoot. I can't remember which skaters, though Kele Rosecrans comes to mind. So we made the trip inland, and I bounced the little Unreel Toyota van off road and got about 100 yards from the pool. The road was too gnarly at the time to get the van to the top. We hiked the last little bit, and when I first saw the pool, it seemed like the best thing in the world. In those days, we had to worry about police or security guards nearly every spot we rode. But at the Nude Bowl, nobody gave a fuck. That was awesome.
I went out to the Nude Bowl two or three more times in '89, to shoot video of skaters, and I made sure to take my bike and carve some lines when I could. In those days, when there were no concrete skateparks at all, it was amazing to ride a pool, hour after hour, and not worry about anybody shutting the session down.
When I started working on my self-produced video, The Ultimate Weekend, in 1990, a session at the Nude Bowl was one of the first places I thought of. It was sometime in the summer when I finally got it to happen. Somehow, I was able to talk skatepark legend Brian Blyther to make the trip out there, though he wasn't riding vert all the time then. He brought Xavier Mendez, another skatepark rider from the 80's. I got the then unknown ripper Keith Treanor, English vert rider John Povah, and flatlander/photographer Mike Sarrail, and we headed out. Despite it being 105 degrees out, we had a great little session. I got footage for my video, and it was a good day all around, despite the heat. You can watch it at 25:54 in this video.
As luck would have it, that session at the Nude Bowl wound up being the first time the pool showed up in a bike video. To make it even better, I used music from Toledo punk band, The Stain, and they had recorded a song called "Pool Party" for some skater friends. It was the perfect song, and I had these crazy dreams of making it a music video and getting it played on MTV. That never happened, but it was a cool video section anyway. In these two clips, you can see a 27 year span of one of the most legendary skate/bike pools ever. Props to Rick Thorne for doing a great series on real life pool riding and skating.
Rick's Nude Bowl clip had 2,605 views when I wrote this post. I'm just curious how many views this post may help it get.
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