First spot of the day was Burnside! Some people had seen it, some hadn’t. Since I’ve never been to Portland before I was one of people that hadn’t ever seen it. Dave, Jack, Josh, Neil and I started on the little mini on the hill in the top photo. It sucked! Axle stalls were hard, unless you are Dave and Jack. Then we went in for the main area. Chris was killing it! He’s the token vert dude on the trip and he skated so hard. Lots of tricks, every trick. I think everyone but Rob took runs in the park. I only took two runs. It wasn’t all that crowded, I was just feeling weird. Everyone else looked good. Dave may have been the one that surprised me the most with his smoothness and large bag of tricks. After awhile we posted up near the parking lot and skated that area. As you can see by the photos a lot went down. What isn’t shown is me skating the parking block below everything. Ha. Ok the narrow new bowl was really fun to carve around in.

Then we moved downtown, hit the food carts, ate food, got kicked out of a fun ledge way too fast then ended up at this fountain spot where we lasted for hours upon hours.

We were literally here for hours. There were multiple people skating it in different ways. I was a part of the ‘treat it like a hip’ crew. Others were doing wallies off part of it or skating the ledge, or dropping in from scary heights. The flip trick the hip session was awesome. Nate did nollie back 270 heel! JP did frontside flip, lots of poppy one foots and nollie bigspin. Carleigh did kickflip even though she was talking with a new friend for a long time. Rob had several of his stylee boneless and some kickflips. I landed almost every flip trick I can do on it. Kickflips both ways, b/s flip, varial flip, hc flip, fakie varial flip, the worst f/s flip ever done I had a blast. Matt killed it with back 50 gap to back 5-0. Jack manualled through the skate stoppers to blunt. Ridiculous. Neil was all over the place. Near the end I began skating the ledge with Carleigh, Matt, Josh, Jack, Rob. Rob did boardslide to manual. I got front 5-0s when I was trying front 50s, a front 50 to front board and maybe technically a smith. Josh had some nice front noses and a front tail or two. Carleigh done did f/s 180 nosegrind a few times. Then we skated around for awhile, hit a shop, got lost and ended up at a huge ramp on the other side of the city.

Nate and I weren’t in the mood for a ramp so we went and skated flat. Well, tried to skate flat. We were so sore and it was not a pretty game. We skated around a little more, but came back to a fun looking session. Josh, Carleigh, Chris, Dave were still skating and ripping. I took a couple of runs and wish I had skated it more. Oh well, at least I beat Nate at SKATE! That was it for the skating on day 2. Long day! Fun day.

We made it to Portland! We flew all the way to Portland to skate spots like the one above! Ha, okay so we landed and had a couple hours to kill before Neil arrived. We went to a bank to curb spot and this was there too. The bank to curb could have been so good, but there was a truck in front of the good area. That didn’t stop Matt from doing some nice ollies, Dave from a pivot to fakie, Fuzz from an ollie I didn’t see behind the truck and a Jack front tail.

Then a couple of us used some piled wood to make this weird manny pad contraption which turned out to be a blast. I am writing this almost a week after the session so it’s really hard to remember what went down. Nate killed it though. Manual first try, nose manual, nose manual turned to switch manual down. So ridiculous. Carleigh ollied up and back 180’d in. Jack did kickflip manual, manual front shove back to manual and more. Chris tried some heelflips up and got close. Fuzz did kickflip up, back 180 in. Front 180 up, f/s halfcab in. I did kickflip up and f/s 180 in. Rob manualled it, no comply manualled it and I want to say nose manual too, but I’m not sure. Oh and back 180 up. I can’t remember what Dave did, but I think it was ollie up and back 180 in, maybe manual too? Then near the end Jack started a funny session off the little electric box into the bank. The box was about 1 foot longer then it looks in the photo so pretty much impossible to get speed. Jack ollied in and I think tail dropped in? Dave and I got dork and did 180s (he’s goofy). I added boneless 90 then took forever to land a funny feeling boneless 270.

Off to a really fun garage we went where we got booted faster then I could ollie up a curb (so we had a couple minutes there).

Then another parking garage where we lasted long enough for several people to do front 5-0’s around a corner curb before we got the boot. That was the end of the skating. Good start!