skate journal: berthoud park early then spring canyon later (june 2, 2017)
With rain threatening Rob and I rolled to Berthoud park to meet Dave and Jake. We arrived to an empty park. I went in to the portapotty and came out and there was like 8 scooter kids and parents sitting on ledges watching. Ugh. Luckily they didn’t stay too long, but there was still a constant wave of scooter kids to ignore all skatepark etiquette. Dave and Jake showed a little later. Rob and I had cruised around, snapped a few ollies, slashes, carves, etc. Dave gets out and was pretty quickly trying nose manuals, 50s, pivots on the extension, etc. Jake had a front tail on the ledge all quick too, back 50, crooks. Rob did the ol’ sick beanplant over the hip, crail slides on the bank, kickflip the hip first try, board slide the tall bench, ripping. Jake and Dave skated the bank to ledge. Dave did switch nose stall and regular nose stall. Jake did front nosespick and they doubled on on front tail/back tail. Unreal. I was in a serious funk and bordering on focusing my board. I forced myself to ollie onto the little ledge. It was hard. I couldn’t get a kickflip over the hip. Then I tried front 50 on the ledge for a long time. Failing over and over. I started hucking flip trick in between fails and got hands down 3 flip and nollie 3 flip which cheered me up a little. I eventually got a few terribly slow front 50s or 5-0s. I might have even gotten a backside flip over the hip after one (or maybe I had moved on to switch noseslide by then). Then we set up the phone to film a hip session since I had done b/s flip and Dave had done front shove. It took both of us awhile to get them again. Rob did the steezy no comply finger flip first try.
Then after food, chilling at MRKT we met Nate at Spring Canyon. He was doing back 5-0s across most of the little ledge and crazy manual tricks across the low part of the manny pad. I was super sore. I was able to get going for a little bit and got some weak 50s on the little ledge and a couple of kickflips, but that was about it. Nate is so good. Fakie 5-0 pop out, fakie 50 halfcab out, nollie nosegrind, fakie back 50, almost fakie back nosegrind, nollie back 180 nose manual 180 out, nollie front 180 nose man, just plain slaying it. Rob picked up on it and was skating super good too. Halfcab manual, no comply manual, manuals around the banks, back 50s, halfcab noseslide the tall bench, nollie front lip. Those dudes were shredding. It was sick.
(setup 8.25″ null spanbauer deck, venture 5.8 lights, venom 88a bushings, bones sft v1 50mm wheels, 3 washers on the outside of each axle, old bad bearings, nbnumeric quincy 254 12 gum/cream, remind cush insoles)