The city just opened a skate park in Santa Monica, two miles from my
pad, and Eyal and I checked it out this morning. There's bike-only
sessions 3 times a week, so I'm in tall cotton since unicycles are
welcome.
The place is NOT built for street riding, rather world-class vert
skateboarding, with the most radical of the five pools being roughly
fifteen foot deep with side walls steep as the flanks of Half Dome. If
you got into a few of those pools with a uni you'd need a fire truck or
a rope to ever get out. These pools make the few 8-10-foot half pipes I
fiddled around on look like sidewalks.
Thankfully there's a 6-foot deep "kiddie pool," where you can get the
hang of dropping straight off the coping and trying to roll it out (a
couple places have a beveled lip for those first few experimental
drops). Below the coping, the walls are vert for only the first few
feet, then they angle out into the flat bottom over the next 4 or so
feet. Exciting at first, but not bad if you're used to rolling out
forward drops. We tried a few rolling drops into the kiddy pool but were
pretty tentative. At this early stage of experimentation, we'd basically
side hop, do a quarter twist in the air and roll out that way.
Things get quite a bit more challenging, and scary, on the 8 foot pool,
which has about a 40 inch airball drop onto a radically steep wall that
rolls out to the flats basically in the last few feet. That's a lot of
compression on a Muni (we were on 24s), and delivers a huge rush. You
gotta go to rubber in 4th gear and get your legs moving like bee's wings
or the roll out's impossible. And it's so steep you can't back pressure
and limit your spinning speed. We're used to doing steep Muniing but
nothing like this.
The twelve foot pool stays vert for about the first 5 feet, the fifteen
footer even more, and we didn't even try those–yet.
That's a wild sensation, jumping off the coping and freefalling till you
go to rubber, then trying to rool it out so you don't face plant on the
flats. I have no idea how deep we can go, but I bought the full pass so
I guess I'm gonna find out.
There's a few 100-foot long rolling whoop runs with steep ramps and a
few stairs you can gap, flanked by think angled walls you can hop onto
(which soon get 3-5 feet high) then "skinny" down to bone jarring
forward drops onto the flats or (harder) onto the steep cement ramps on
both sides. There's also some "skinnies from hell" formed by the raised
coping separating sections of various pools. Some roll out onto humps
inside the pools, which the bikers fly off. If you bungle the skinny
early on, it's a six to twelve foot drop/roll out on either side. Eyal
did the easiest one while I watched.
Basically I was expecting a "street" park to practice hopping, gapping
and roll outs–stuff we use for Muniing. Instead this place is more like
an uni practiceground for cliffdiving. You can't really do much once
you're down inside the pool because you can't maintain enough momentum
on a muni to get up on the side walls--but maybe on a Coker, though the
huge drop in on a 36 incher will be something to behold.
Basically the Santa Monica skatepark was way, way over my head to do
anything but the easiest stuff. But I've learned from Muniing in Santa
Barbara that practice brings most anything down to size. But I wanna
see the guy drop into the 15 foot pool and roll it out 'cause it ain't
never gonna be me.
If you're ever in the area, give it a look.
http://www.socalskateparks.com/park/santamonica
JL
--
vivalargo - Santa Barbara Unicycle Club
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