This 12 minute video about skate spots popped up on my feed the other day, and I took the time to check it out. For the first minute or so, I wasn't sure where this video was going. It's basically a very well produced, short documentary on skate spots, but from an anthropologist's point of view. It's like a group of sociologists were studying skateboarders as a cultural group. By the middle, I totally dug this video, which is why I'm sharing it here. For all of us who have spent hours riding, skating, or otherwise sessioning spots in one action sport or another, it's a cool look at why we sought out spots years ago, and still do.
Since I was a BMX freestyler/street rider, a not-so-great skateboarder, and a rock climbing boulderer/builderer back in the day, I spent a lot of time looking for and sessioning different kinds of spots. As a fat, old, blogger years later, I started overthinking and writing about the myriad of aspects of action sports. Looking back, the spots we found and sessioned fascinated me. A curb or a set of stairs, or a bit of banked asphalt against a wall, could become famous around the world. That's crazy when you stop to think about it.
We don't just stop noticing and thinking about spots when we stop riding or skating for one reason or another. I'm 57-years-old right now, and about 350 pounds, thanks my years of eating way too much while working as a taxi driver. I haven't ridden my bike seriously since 2003, over 20 years ago. But as I started on this blog post, a virgin bank to wall I found last year, a quarter mile from where I'm sitting right now, popped into my head. I long for the days when I can get a bike again, and at least go do some rollbacks or something on it. The eye for spots, and the urge to session them, just doesn't go away.
One of my favorite things back in my hardcore riding days was to just ride around for hours, just wandering areas I hadn't checked out before, looking for things to ride. When I found something cool, I'd have a little solo session. If it was a good enough spot, I'd bring other riders there later on. As a not-so-good, but good enough to have fun skateboarder, I sessioned several banks and a few ditches on skateboards over the years, as well.
In fact, my first experience with sessioning a spot was with my lime green, $12, plastic, Scamp skateboard in 1976 and 1977, in the tiny town of Willard, Ohio. In front of my friend Jeff's house, at 221 Laurel Street in Willard, there was a small hill, heading down to Clark Street. None of us at age 9 or 10 could stand up on our boards and make it all the way down the hill. But we spent a lot of time sitting on our boards sideways, with our feet on a friend's board, and double skating, on our butts, down that little hill. That was my first skate spot. Not long after, when our skating skills had improved, we would go the parking lot of Trinity Lutheran church, at Myrtle and Emerald, and skate down the parking lot hill, with one board stacked on top of another. Then there was the little tree root skate jump in front of our house when we moved to Tiffin Street, a block from Jeff's house. For most of us, that's how we rode or skated our first spots. We went to the things that were fun to ride or skate in our neighborhood as kids. As our skills progressed and we got older, we sought out better and more challenging spots, farther and farther from home. Now, decades later, it's not unusual for serious action sports people to travel to another country to session a surf break during a huge swell, or ride that skate park or cool street spot they saw in a magazine or video. The adventure of the whole trip is part of the fun.
As the action sports themselves progressed, new tricks and styles of riding or skating drove us to learn new tricks, and look for different types of spots. In the mid 1980's, I remember looking for banks and curb jumps mostly. Then benches became a thing, when I learned bunnyhop footplants. As Old School BMX freestylers, we saw a photo of Eddie Roman doing a wall ride in about 1987, and suddenly walls, or better yet, banks to walls, became a thing. When bashguards and better pegs came along, long ledges to grind were sought out, which led to grinding rails. Later gaps became a thing. Throughout that whole early era of BMX freestyle, dirt jumps were always a place to ride. BMX racers preferred tabletops or sets of double jumps, while freestylers usually preferred flyout jumps.
The whole idea of spots fascinated me so much, that back in September of 2021, looking for new ideas, I started a blog called The Spot Finder. I figured that even if I was too broke and out of shape to ride these days, I could publish a cool blog about spots, and write about a few spots that I found in my wanderings, as well. After several months, that blog's Google account was one of three of my Google accounts that got deleted one night. I don't know why. They just disappeared. Weird things like that have been happening in my life for over 20 years now. So I lost access to this blog. The blog's still online, but I can't add to it anymore. Here's the link: The Spot Finder blog.
Here's one of the spots I wrote about in The Spot Finder blog, the Studio City Monster Wall. Just for reference, that blue thing in the back of the photo is a car. This wall is enormous. I used to ride this crazy, huge, banked wall, way back in 1991-1995, when I lived in the San Fernando Valley for a while, and when I worked at the nearby CBS TV studios in the summers. I only got 3 or 4 feet up this wall. It looks like you could just blast 15 feet high, but it's bumpy and has a hard concrete landing, making it much gnarlier than it looks in photos. This is just one of my personal spots that's never had a magazine photo or video shot at it. I sessioned it many times, more than 30 years ago. I'd love to see what some of today's riders could do with this wall and a launch ramp. Back in the early 1990's, I also used to ride a big ditch in the Hollywood Hills, and about a year ago learned that it was the Viper Bowl, an epic skate spot in the 1970's and early 1980's.
In the early 1990's, about the time BMX "died," I finally realized I was never ever going to be a top level rider, the pro thing I had dreamed about, just wasn't going to happen. I still loved riding my bike, but also told myself "Man, I suck" every time I got on my bike for quite a while. OK, I sucked compared to my roommates at the time, guys liked Chris Moeller, Dave Clymer, Alan and Brian Foster, you know, some of the best riders in the world. But I struggled with riding for a while, I'd have a bunch of negative feeling about riding, but then be stoked when I was actually out doing it.
Then I got this summer job working on the crew of the American Gladiators TV show. Two of my better friends on the set that first year were the Gladiators Elektra (Salina Bartunek), and Siren (Shelley Beattie). Salina was a hardcore rock climber, and we had a 32 foot climbing wall on set. Being afraid of heights, and inspired by Salina's rock climbing tales and climbing magazines, I started goofing around on the wall at lunch and after work. When our 7 week shooting season ended in the summer of 1992, I went back to living in Huntington Beach, and started looking for places to practice climbing, urban climbing spots. Climbing short routes, without ropes, on real rocks, or really big boulders, is called bouldering. Climbing on man-made urban spots without ropes is called buildering.
So I found some big slabs of concrete in the rubble at the bottom of the Huntington Beach cliffs, on the beach, north of Goldenwest street. Those were my first climbing spots, and were super easy by climbing standards. But I could do 3 or 4 moves on each, and start to get the feel of climbing outside. Then I found The Beach (aka Pirate's Cove), a hidden little cove of sandstone cliffs, in Corona Del Mar, just south of Newport Beach. I started going there once every couple of weeks, and eventually once or twice a week for a while. I climbed there, off and on, for several years.
The next summer, working back up in The Valley, I found the legendary bouldering spot in Chatsworth, called Stoney Point. That's where climbing legends, like Yvonne Chouinard (founder of Patagonia), Royal Robbins, and a few others, practiced climbing back in the 1960's and 1970's. As my climbing skills got up to the 5.8 to 5.10 level, maybe 5.11 range, I found more buildering spots. Many of you Old School BMXers will recognize this spot below. 
The Blues Brothers Wall in Huntington Beach, about half a mile north of the H.B. Pier. This is a video still of me doing a wall ride over my sister Cheri's head in 1990, from my video, The Ultimate Weekend. It's the coolest riding pic I have from those days.
The Blues Brother's Wall is a retaining wall, on the ocean side of Pacific Coast Highway, in Huntington Beach. What most people don't realize is that the sandy area in front of this wall is the old railroad bed for the trolley line that once went up to Long Beach, connecting Huntington Beach to the L.A. trolley/railroad system in the early 1900's. In fact, H.B. was Pacific City originally, and they renamed the city after SoCal railroad magnate, Henry Huntington, in exchange for him building that trolley line. That really started bringing a lot more people to the sleepy little beach town then.
My video camera, when I shot the footage above, was sitting on the top of another retaining wall, which dropped down into the actual sand of the beach. That lower retaining wall, which is maybe a half mile long, sticks out of the sand anywhere from a few inches to about 12 feet in a few places. Right below the Blues Brothers Wall there's a big drain, and there was 10 to 12 feet high sections of just under vert concrete wall there. That was my main buildering spot during the late 1990's, when I lived on 15th Street, a few blocks away. I had about 10 different little vertical routes, and a 300 foot plus traverse that went sideways along the wall. I called it the Anarchy Wall, because there was a big circle A symbol someone had put on it with surf wax years earlier, that never really wore off. For me, the 1990's was a time of sessioning BMX spots, climbing spots, and the occasional skateboard spot.
In my last years of riding, around 2001-2003, I lived for a while in Garden Grove, a not that far from Disneyland. I used to session the upper parts of the Santa Ana River ditch, a huge, concrete drainage ditch that went for several miles, nearly all the way to the Pacific Ocean. I did some skating there, too, always riding by myself, in those days. There are a bunch of good spots in that area for BMX street riding and skateboarding.
In my 20 years of riding my bike almost every day, from 1983 to 2003, my favorite riding spots were Golden Gate Park in San Francisco (best flatland scene), the Jinx Bank in Redondo Beach, The Spot in Redondo (flatland), the Huntington Beach Pier (flatland/freestyle skating) and H.B. Pier Bank, Huntington High School, the Santa Ana River Ditch (Costa Mesa/Santa Ana), the Blues Brothers Wall (H.B.), and the Oceanview High flyout jump, and Sheep Hills (Costa Mesa) for the first couple of years, before the jumps got big, and the Nude Bowl (outside Palm Springs). For skating, my fav spots were the H.B. Pier (skating with Pierre Andre', Don Brown, & the locals), the H.B. library pond (when it was drained), and much later, the Santa Ana River ditch. As a climber, my favorite spots were The Beach and the Anarchy Wall (14th Street at the beach in H.B.). I have been to Hueco Tanks in Texas, and to Joshua Tree, in the California desert, but those were before and after my climbing years, respectively.
I know all of you BMXers, skaters, and anyone else reading this who was is or was into one action sport or another, have your favorite spots from over the years. The point of this post is to remind all of you of how obscure spots, like a curb, a ditch, a pool, a bank, or whatever, provided many hours of great sessions at some point in your life. All of these sports continue to grow and evolve from the early years us Gen X geezers, and even some Boomers, remember back in the day. New equipment, tricks, and riding styles have led to new spots being found and sessioned all the time. The videos below have a whole bunch of epic spots, and amazing riding, skating, and boarding, in them. They are all worth checking out.
Some great videos of many different action sports spots that you may not have seen...
Indy X Slayer promo video shot at The Nude Bowl (Skate/BMX- Southern California desert)
FDR- 4th of July Jam 2020- (skate- Philedelphia, PA)
Late 1990's ESPN segment on Sheep Hills (BMX- Costa Mesa, CA)
2014 Chris Gentry rap video about Sheep Hills and Boozer Jam (BMX- Costa Mesa, CA)
Ayato Kimura- Keep It Wild- (dirt/urban mountain bike- various spots- Japan)
Best of Skimboarding 2023 (Aliso Beach, Laguna Beach CA)
All Terrain: A Wakeboarding Expedition with Graeme Burress (urban wakeboarding- various spots)
Todd Skinner at Hueco Tanks-1990's? (Rock climbing/bouldering- outside El Paso, TX)
Big Day at The Wedge- April 17, 2024 (Boogie boarding/surfing- (Newport Beach, CA)
Surfline- Code Red II at Teahupo'o- 2022 (Surfing- Tahiti, French Polynesia)
Steve Emig: The White Bear blog is coming up on 1,000 total posts- this is #993
I've been doing a lot of writing lately on a platform designed for writers, called Substack. Check it out:
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