Ditch skating and keeping it cool
A little video from today, at one of my favorite spots.
This spot is known as the Turkey Bowl, in Austin, Texas. When I lived here I skated it two or three times a week. It is the only piece of Austin that I miss at all. Today was the first time in 20 years that I've skated it -- since we moved back to Dallas in 2005.
So, ditches. Drainage ditches and other "found" terrain with banked walls predated skateparks. To this day a good ditch, like this one, is my preferred terrain.
A skateboarder's life is a series of spot found, skated, and usually lost to development, redevelopment, or intentional destruction because someone doesn't like you skating there (usually because there are dickhead making too much noise, or these days "improving" the ditch/spot with their own "DIY" concrete doors. As it turns out, most city public works departments don't actually love it when skaters add a bunch of shit to a drainage ditch that was designed for - GASP - drainage. They may turn a blind eye to a few parking block, but once you start pouring concrete, bringing ramps, or having all your friends out for a BBQ while you skate, things usually go south quickly.
The Turkey Bowl was victim to such happening in recent decades. Due to the antics of skaters, people on motorcycles, etc, "skate stoppers" were driven into the concrete. Quite literally hundreds of them. Some industrious skaters, however, went out and somehow smashed them out, leaving only a little plastic "pimples" and a metal spikes still in the pavement. They hammered the spikes deeper, so now you only run over the little pimples.
You can now ride the ditch with little trouble. I started the day on some smaller, harder wheels (54mm, 95a durometer). Having never ridden the now-pimpled Turkey Bowl, feeling the pimples through those small hard wheels was not to my liking. So I switched to the other board I brought, a 1980s style retro-clone from Super-8 Skateboards, on which I had 60mm 90a Powell-Peralta Rat Bones wheels.
Rat Bones were the go-to wheel for skaters for many years in the 1980s, and for good reason. They are big, but not too big. The 90a hardness ones roll fast and are very smooth. Turns out that having wheels that roll smoothly and fast over semi-rough concrete with hundreds of little pimples is better for rolling over that stuff and flowing.
They would have been the superior wheel choice even without the evil pimples.
Anyway - all you DIY lunatic assholes - stop being so fucking stupid! You are ruining spots. I hate you!