Illegal skate contest in the L.A. River bed

This event happened on the DL about a month ago, somewhere in the L.A. riverbed.  This informal contest video just has a lot of damn good skating in it, and apparently was sponsored by Gorilla Energy Drink (never heard of it) and Keen Ramps.  It's just a cool, solid video if you're into street skating.  

I stumbled upon this video, while checking out a BMX video.  This came up on the side, as things do on YouTube.  As some of you may know, I worked at Vision Skateboard's video company, Unreel Productions, way back in the olden days.  We did a street skating video shoot back when street skating was a really new thing.  It happened in an empty parking lot, right on the corner of 17th and Placentia in Costa Mesa, caddy corner to the bar that had once been the legendary Cuckoo's Nest.  

In this Vision Street Wear commercial, one of the obstacles was a 4 foot high quarterpipe up against the wall of a building.  You can see 3 or 4 quick shots of that shoot in this commercial.  Kele Rosecrans was doing loud, wheel squealing, six foot high, front side power slides above that tiny ramp that day.  It was amazing.  So the quarterpipe against the wall, under the bridge, reminded me of that Vision shoot, way back in the day.  

These skaters go off, and it's great vibe for the jam/contest.  Check out the video.

For most people of Generation X, this location looks familiar because the L.A. River bed was where they filmed the iconic race scene for the movie Grease.  

Epic mini ramp/bowl skate session at Woodward West

This is a recent warm-up jam session at a mini ramp bowl at Woodward West, in Tehachapi, CA.  A bunch of pro skaters, the only one I can identify is Andy Anderson, one of my favorite skaters to watch these days.  He's the only one with a helmet on.  But they all rip.  This is a really rough cut of the raw footage of the jam session, and the whole thing is off the chain.  If you like mini ramp skating, check it out.

For those not aware, to the best of my knowledge, the first skateboard mini ramp was invented in 1987, in Costa Mesa, California.  A few blocks from the Vision Skateboards main building, on Towne Street, Paul Schmitt (aka Professor Schmitt of Schmitt Stix, New Deal, etc.) and a few skaters rented a house, and built a 9 foot high halfpipe in the backyard.  But the neighbors complained, and city officials came. They said that, to appease some obscure building code, the skaters had to cut the ramp down to six feet tall.  Originally it was either an 8 foot transition ramp with a foot of vert, or a 9 foot transition.  When they chopped the top of the ramp off, they had an 8 or 9 foot transition cut off at 6 feet.  The mini ramp was born, and it became known as the Towne Street ramp.  Skaters from all over sessioned there at times, and realized there was a whole new genre' of tricks, mostly lip tricks, that you could do on a mini ramp.  The idea of backyard mini ramps started to spread.  At the Vision Skate Escape /NSA season finals in late 1988, Vision took the idea of the back to back vert ramps from the Powell-Peralta Bones 3 video, the Animal Chin ramp, and built a double ramp, with a vert and mini back to back. That was a first for a skateboard contest.  

In my 1990 self-produced BMX video, The Ultimate Weekend, in 1990, I had footage at what I thought were the first three mini ramps ever in a BMX video.  I shot footage at the H-Ramp (2:05) in Santa Ana, CA, pro freestyle skaters Primo and Diane Desiderio's ramp (19:43) north of San Diego, CA, and Mouse's Ramp (38:05), the Bad Boys Club clothing art director, near San Diego.  Going through a bunch of videos earlier this year, I learned that someone else (Eddie Roman's 2-Hip Ride Like a Man, or maybe the Dirt Bros. Video, I can't remember), also had a little bit of mini ramp footage in their video, a couple of months earlier.  

By about 1989-1990, more mini ramps were popping up, like the Blockhead Ramp, a mini bowl outside of San Diego, and there were mini ramp sections at the huge Powell-Peralta skate zone, built for their skaters, in Santa Barbara, CA.  From those, as they showed up in videos, the backyard mini ramp idea spread around the U.S. and the world.  So there's a little bit of the history of mini ramps in the bike and skate world.     

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