Traveling is extremely fun and takes me to a ton of great places meeting great people, that being said, nothings much better than taking a rip with some old friends on a local favorite. In the past few years Ive been all around the west coast, pacific islands, British Colombia and everywhere in between, but nothing seems to compare to our local roads. Our runs have a long history and have been spotted in downhill media for years intriguing many of our runs.
Many people find them selves traveling to santa barbara just to get a run or two on our runs that we constantly find ourselves hosting random skaters. The photo above shows oakland local and now good friend, Ryka Mohammadian, Ripping one of my local runs. Ryka came down and slept on my couch to get some media, something extremely common to see because the unique runs and ridiculous corners. Even though we get swarmed by tourists wanting to see what the hype is, just a one run hit and quit with the kids you started out with is hard to beat runs with pros. Starting out skating i was fortunate enough to start at a time where their was a large crew of kids starting out that were willing to show me the ropes. Even though one or two of them still skate today, they have all become life time friends from the fun we’ve had skating local neighborhoods.
Alex Proksch is one of the few who who still enjoys flying through canyons on some urethane. Living right at the bottom of the run he’s constantly flowing down sliding through corners barely having to look wheres he’s going. Skating a run that is so frequent, so well known, is different than anything else, you don’t think about what you’re doing, or anything for that matter, all you can do is let you’re mind be absorbed by nothing and let you’re muscles and board do what they do best while you seemingly float aimlessly down the run absolutely absent minded of what you’re doing. Even in state of crisis, a car in your lane, or a late predrift, your body, knowing the terrain so well, that it reacts before you have time to realize anything happened. You get up, laugh it off and skate on, quickly slipping back into a state of nirvana. That is what drives me to get up and skate everyday, unworried about police, kooks or overcompensating locals, just focus on forgetting everything on the way down.
lurkfiles 