It was early May in Colorado, and it was supposed to rain all weekend. The Buffalo Bill Downhill on Lookout Mountain, organized by Comet conspirator and Pagan pioneer Justin Dubois, was slated for May 9-10. Lookout Mountain was paved in 1917. The road was graded to accommodate Model T cars, so the average grade is 7% and is littered with hairpin turns – albeit flat hairpin turns – but we’ll get to that later.
The minute I got off the plane I was greeted by the legendary Callahan and Rizzo, and we got to work picking up the road closure signs. We were graciously fed free burgers and bratwursts by the Colorado Dept. of Transportation. By 2 p.m. we had added Brent Dubendorff and Kevin Reimer to the van, and by the evening Graham Buksa had joined the posse. We were all staying with MC Callahan and were treated to amazing hospitality by the Estes Park family.
The next day we agreed to drive one of the support vehicles, which gave us all plenty of time to get to know each other even better and skate some unreal Rado goodness – and, thankfully, stay out of jail, thanks to Dubes’ vigilance. Every road we skated was hit and quit, in and out, one or two runs max to keep the neighbors and fuzz off our backs.
The cast of characters that showed up for this event was all-time, and everyone chipped in to make it happen. Top racers were graciously throwing hay bales for hours. There were no biased brackets contrived to preserve “top” racers for the final heat, just a spin of the “wheel of death” to decide the heats, Buffalo Bill shotguns, snow camping at 8000 feet and hardcore rain racing. Everyone pulled his own weight. Everyone shredded. Big ups to Rado local Zak Maytum for taking the final heat, followed by a sick inside pass by Louis Pilloni (2nd) on Will Brunson (3rd) and “King Brian” Elderkin (4th).
After racing on Sunday, I found myself in the same van with Kevin Reimer and Anthony Flis, maxed out on burritos and trying to follow Callahan and Rizzo on the long ride back to Estes Park. Rado roads are steep and winding, but unlike the unpredictable corners of the East Coast or the banked corners of California, Colorado corners are flat, offering more of a challenge for high-speed lines. Anthony and I were trying to figure out why when Kevin suggested an answer. “Geology and pitch dictate whether a road will be able to follow a ‘natural line’ true to the landscape or an ‘unnatural’ man-made traverse created to allow for easy travel,” he said. “Banking is too difficult on hard rock.”
I was impressed by this well-thought-out answer. The concept of “natural” versus “unnatural” roads was so compelling that I did some research and compared the geology in the Rockies to that of other areas like the Appalachians of the East Coast and the coastal range of California.
LEFT BRAIN, RIGHT BRAIN
Road construction is a science. In general, as humans we meld creativity and practicality to solve various problems. However, in the case of road construction, the hard sciences of geology, hydrology, calculus, geometry, navigation, etc. dominate over any sort of creative art form.
The right brain is the center of creativity and nonlinear thought, while the left brain provides us the capacity for structure and linear thought. Pop psychology or not, it has been estimated that we use approximately only 20% of our brains. What of the rest?
We live in a left-brain world; let’s face it. But what does it mean to you as a skateboarder? Navigating our surroundings is a necessary function for all species. Before paving roads and sidewalks, we made our way through our environment leaving scented, worn paths behind, much like goats leaving a trail on a steep alpine landscape generation after generation.
There are many theories about why our species left our place of origin, which likely was a lush equatorial African forest with plenty of food. That aside, however, as we radiated outward from our origin, we created networks of paths eventually interconnecting all over the world. The networks of these pathways were our first glances at linear time. How long will it take to get water? How long to the other side of the forest and back? Will I be exposed to predators? Sun? Hunger? Paths led not only to our next meal, but eventually to the defining and catalyzing of our left brain and more developed linear thought.
As our species began to grasp strategy, execution, collecting, stacking, process, maps, patterns and, most of all, our opposable thumbs, global conditions somehow genetically selected for the more organiz ed hominids and the left brain began to expand.
Before consciousness and left brain superdevelopment, some say our species used our large brains for telepathy, transcendence, levitation and things relegated to fiction these days. We were in tune with nature, insofar as we simply ate and did not s**t where we ate. The rest of our time was spent gliding between dimensions. Time was an amorphous continuum, not a linear race.
The Dalai Lama has said that the human condition we now observe will be short-lived. War, poverty, environmental degradation, etc. will be ephemeral; humans are good.
I will posit that as skateboarders we are on our way to tapping into ancient wisdom. Twenty percent of our brains and some incredible leftbrain proficiency have delivered us roads and much of our modern society, for better or worse. I like to think that skateboarders are tapping into the other 80% as we fly down these roads. We are taking things made for a very utilitarian purpose and transforming them for another — thus expanding our minds.
We are taking the well-mapped trappings of the left brain, i.e. roads and tools (skateboards) and learning to levitate again. You have felt it. You know why you skateboard without ever putting words to it.
ROCKY (AND ROCKIES) ROADS
Colorado’s Rocky Mountains are a natural wonder. One of the youngest mountain ranges in the world, the Rockies stretch from New Mexico through British Columbia up to Alaska. The Continental Divide runs along the crest of the Rocky Mountains throughout most of their course. Rivers drain eastward to the Atlantic Ocean or Gulf of Mexico, westward to the Pacific Ocean or northward to the Arctic Ocean. The rivers running through the Rockies are the Colorado, Snake, Rio Grande, Arkansas, Columbia, Fraser, Missouri, Saskatchewan, Athabasca, Peace, Mackenzie and Yukon, along with untold streams and tributaries. The geology is mostly granite, an igneous rock (magma that cools under ground) that is very hard. The Rocky Mountains were sculpted by a series of tectonic uplifts, the last of which was as recent as 20 million years ago. This relatively young age allows for the steep, raw and challenging nature of this range – and thus the need for winding, traversing roads graced with hairpins and sweepers.
Road construction in hard granite, steep mountain areas like the Colorado Rockies is a harrowing feat. Erosion is not a big issue (as it is in other places like California), which allows engineers to plan roads for whatever is appropriate for most automobiles at high-speed travel. Subsequently, road construction crews can carve grades and corners right into the granite mountainside. While in some cases the carving of a road might follow some natural topography, it is likely that mountain roads in the Rockies are the result of altering the landscape and taking an “unnatural pathway.” In this steep terrain, it is necessary to create some sort of traverse, which usually results in long, straight sections of road with big sweepers and big, gnarly, flat hairpins. As engineers design and build roads into this hard granite, they must use explosives and heavy machines, making it difficult to bank them. Roads, even if they are vestiges of ancient wild pathways, are now a mathematically calculated and highly engineered phenomenon.
Modern engineers and road construction experts employ a number of processes in the pursuit of constructing safe and durable roadways. The first step is the aerial photograph to understand the myriad possibilities. Next is on-site land surface evaluation. This consists of elevation surveys and evaluating changes over distance. Once a site has passed initial tests, geological samples are gathered to assess the stability of the site, check for aquifers and fault lines, etc. – essentially, to try to know all that needs to be known about what is under the surface.
Once all the info is gathered, it is time to carve. It takes years to proceed with a site from planning to construction. Risk analysis weighs in heavily to deem a site ready — as does the budget. Exceptional mountain roads in a developed nation can cost taxpayers up to $10 million per mile. To be sure, downhill skateboarding is not one of the major selling points for the deployment of tax dollars. And that leads us to unintended consequences and the right brain – utilitarian mobility transformed into adrenaline-crazed, mind-overmatter transcendence.
In Rado the air is thin, and the following is an excerpt from a day in the life of a Colorado pass hunter.
What can I say about the road? Corner… tuck… avoid the gnarly reef… tuck... bump... REEF!... tuck…“I must be going 60”…stand up…try not to footbrake... DON’T…HUGE carousel lefty... grab rail this time…“Don’t go off the road…but if you do, aim for that willow bush again!”…tuck...set up for the weird dip... “Oh, that wasn’t so bad”...Calvin trying to pass me here again…tuck...don’t let him!! ...“Oh, here comes the straight”...head down…“Holy s**t, must be doing 60+”...“Who cares?”.... “Where did Calvin go?”…playing chicken with yourself…into the most bad-ass rollercoaster chicanes…“ This is nuts”...NO FOOTYBRAKE!!!... “Here we go!” Into the righty!... MEGATRON!!!!... so good!...what a corner!!!!! A banked wave...a crooked ski jump!!!... burning urethane!...grip… grip... feel it going...grip…tuck... “Should’ve hit it faster”…set up for the left…surf’s up! ...No hands!!!... tuck... look back... “Oh, s**t, he’s kinda catching me”… squeeze harder… forgot about this corner!... more burning urethane... keep breathing… look back... “He’s not catching me after all!”… another corner... a f**kin’ labyrinth of corners – so many corners!... stick it on the dirt!... “My legs are cooking!”... all I can do is... “WOOT!!!”... everyone is killing it!.. .let’s f**kin’ GO!!!!!
Like kings on the hunt…this is our place today. We skate non-stop for four and a half hours... Too many runs (or not enough) later, its time to call it. We’ve had a good session; let’s quit while we’re ahead. On the way out, we pass one of Chaffee County’s finest, driving with serious intent. Soon after, we pass a State Patrol car flying up the canyon with lights flashing and sirens blasting. “Hope that was not for us.”Seeing the po-po go by as we were leaving was the icing on the cake...another successful pass hunt.
Roads that were designed to accelerate and facilitate basic human needs are now home to the expansion of consciousness. My friend Matt, who is doing his Ph.D. research on bird brains at Cornell University, straight up told me that the whole right/left brain thing is bulls**t if you try to isolate the two. “People are not right-brain or left-brain people,” he said. Rather, different parts of the brain hold the capacity for different functions in individuals, and the interplay between creativity and linear thought is just more complex in some cases than others. In my estimation, we are seeing a sort of evolution bouncing from one facility to another. Our capacity for more complex right- or left-brain development will be strengthened by how we as a species collectively play off each type of thinking. As seen with other forms of evolution in past observations of natural history, things happen the same all over. Similar environmental conditions, even if geographically isolated, lead to convergent trends. In other words, the same thing is happening all over the world at the same time, independent of any one skate scene’s influence. The growing scenes in the East Coast Appalachians and in the Rockies are very well connected. EAST IS EAST…
The Appalachians have had several hundred million years to mellow out and are subsequently less extreme than their younger cousin, the Rocky Mountains.
The Appalachians formed during the Paleozoic, with major uprisings from 650-350 million years ago. By the time humans reached their slopes, the Appalachians had worn down from prehistoric peaks more than 18,000 feet high to north-south alignment allows species to migrate easily – species including humans like Anthony Flis. His description is below.
“Nothing is consistent about the road type in the east, except that the roads are inconsistent – which is the beauty of them. On the same road, I have encountered banked corners and severely off-camber corners that trail off away from the apex.”
The East Coast landscape is very lush and thick with forest. It’s rare to be riding exposed to the sky. You’re usually under a canopy of trees. I mean there are definitely roads that are very open, like around New York near Ithaca and Munnsville, but almost every road I’ve skated from Vermont down to Carolina is in thick, beautiful deciduous forest. In Quebec that changes to big, thick coniferous forest, but there is still a thick forest. As a result, roads with the same pitch and corner types can feel quite different. If you have the exact same slope and turns on two different mountains, one with a thick, impenetrable forest and one with little vegetation and covered in rocks and major vista views, the latter, more exposed road feels gnarlier. I know that when you are surrounded by trees it can feel a little more secure, because you don’t really feel the magnitude of what you are doing…you can’t see for miles in all directions or see the road winding a couple of hundred feet below you on a different part of the mountain. It’s much more intimidating to drop in on a hill that is perceived as being a massive undertaking. Either way, after you kick in your focus shifts away from the landscape and to just you and the road.
The geology of the east is so varied that every type of road exists. Road construction out east has been happening for hundreds of years longer as well. So people are expanding off roads that were built when road construction was not as developed a science. Population density on hilly terrain is not quite the same as it is out west, so hills to skate can be a bit more feral – dirt to pavement and back again, total butter to some frost-heaved crust. As the population gets more dense in the hills, we may begin to see some of the newer road sciences developed in the west applied to the hills of the east.
…AND WEST IS WEST
The geologic history of California’s coastal mountains began several hundred million years ago when movement in the earth’s crust catalyzed the processes that created the coastal ranges. Plate tectonics is the system of loosely interlocking plates in the earth’s crust, floating on a matrix of less solid material. The North American Plate supports the continent of North America, and the Pacific Plate lies beneath the Pacific Ocean. About 250 million years ago these two plates, which had been gradually moving toward each other, collided; the sea floor crust of the Pacific Plate slipped beneath the continent, heating and melting as it reached the earth’s interior. Between 150 and 140 million years ago this molten rock, or magma, began to push upward, forming the Klamath and Peninsular ranges.
In northern California, the Klamath Mountains are composed of metamorphic and granitic rock – formed as a result of extreme changes in temperature, pressure and chemical composition that occurred when molten material from below the earth’s crust was pushed to the surface. South of the Klamath Mountains, the Coast Ranges on the continent’s edge range from Humboldt County to San Francisco Bay and southward, forming a series of low mountains paralleling the coast. South of the bay, which separates the Coast Ranges into northern and southern ranges, are the Diablo, Gabilan, Santa Cruz and Santa Lucia mountains, the highest of which reach to 4,000 feet. Sea floor sediments comprised of sandstones and shale make up the loose geology of the majority of sea cliffs on the coast. This is the geology of the legendary Oakland Hills, Malibu Canyon and so on.
In the Malibu region of southern California, where Kevin Reimer likes to spend a day every so often, he has recognized many patterns to the roads. Unlike the extremely hard, steep granite of the Rockies or the varied hard-sediment forest of the Appalachians, the Coastal range is very soft soiled, with myriad arroyos etched into a single hillside. This soft-sided terrain lends itself perfectly to road construction that meanders with the natural, water-carved paths. Spending days happily gliding, Kevin has also observed an even deeper and more pervasive pattern. Many of the canyons in Malibu are north- or south-facing, each of which has topography defined by gullies and points. On the south-facing canyons the points create tight rights and the gullies create tight lefts. The opposite is true on north-facing canyons.
California civil engineers are forced to tap into nature’s course because of the soft, erosion-prone substrate they deal with. Unlike the hard rock walls of the Rockies, the coastal geology would simply collapse and erode away if any alteration were made to the course. The best California can do is follow the exquisite, sinewy paths that rain has etched. The wonderful thing about this soft soil is that the grade is perfect – not too steep and not too flat. That, coupled with California’s car culture, makes for the next beautiful phenomenon: California loves its banked turns. The soft-sided canyons are relatively similar to building sand castles as opposed to chiseling away granite. The need for speed and elegant turning has created the perfect mastery in road evolution. AND NEVER THE TWAIN SHALL MEET (?)
What is next? Civil engineering may be a field to consider if you are a downhill skateboarder. If you can get through the seven years of college, you might just have a life of building incidental skateboard parks paid for by auto drivers – or better yet, building actual dedicated skateparks on melted ski resorts as the snow seasons get shorter and shorter across the globe.
In the ’80s, one facet of skating was ripping backyard ramps and pools that were unique – some good, some not so well built. Human-made materials and terrain designed for one thing and used for another shaped a generation of skaters who went on to build their own terrain and are now progressing transition skating to something crazier than ever before imagined. Dreamland Skateparks is the perfect example of the interplay of utility and creativity. The right and the left are perfectly channeled. Concrete, rebar and fill material used for making blocks and rooms to contain are unleashed into over-vert, mind-bending acceleration vectors that expand.
What if downhill skaters were to start applying the gifts that the left brain has bestowed upon the right brain and merge the two for creating the ultimate roads? Forty-five degree banks through hairpins at 50+ mph, anyone? Get to work – the evolution of our species depends on it! ƒ
Channel ONE: CalStreets Channel TWO: Evolutions 4 
