Mean as a snake
As background to the Gabriel Park snake discussion, Here is more info on the old Seylynn snake run.
There is a documentary about it: The Seylynn Story. The website has a trailer for the film that shows some action and a collection of photos. The site says that’s Gator doing an Andrecht in the snake.
Dan Hughes has photos of the park on Northwest Skater.
Google maps satellite shot of the park.
I watched Chris Miller do this a year before the thrasher cover and the shot was published in Transworld the year before. He tore that place apart and I was stoked to know I was right behind the photographer when the shot was taken. I haven’t been up there since 1986. It would be a fun trip.
http://www.seylynn.com/pictures/Chris-Miller.jpg I guess the picture didn’t show up in my comment. No html in the comments I guess.
Yeah, you have to actually type in the whole html though, that’s just a URL.
Chris Miller cover link
I see… I coded an img tag and it disappeared after the word “this” in my first comment.
Hmm. I’ll look into it.
Making the trip to Seylynn = so worth it. I’m in Ontario right now away from my schooltime home. I wish I was there.
Image stolen from over here.
I’m also pretty sure if you turn on the flickr maps thing, you would find some of my photos located there. It’s fun.
The image that in fact, also did not show, proper HTML included. Weird.
I don’t think you can put images in this comment area. I followed the link though, awesome shot!
SOFTW material fer sure. Drop me an email Dylan.
I’ve skated this park, its a hoot. You can actaully carve back up to the top pumping the inside of the hips all the way back up……..silly fun. I would be super stoked to teach my daughter how to skate in a park just like this….RAD! There’s a place called Griffin Park that is similiar to this, White Rock and Whistler both have a snake runs that are timeless.
[...] a while back. But I commented with the picture on a Skate and Annoy post concerning one of my most favourite skateparks. Well the nice dudes over at SnA have designated my photo as their “Shot of the [...]
Geth has expressed some confusion about my view of “super features†like his funnels. As I thought about how best to reply, I stumbled upon an analogy I have not used before. I’m posting it publicly so people can critique it.
I like super features. In many respects they represent the latest challenges in skateboarding, at least as expressed in concrete. I don’t endorse super features anywhere and everywhere, however. For me to embrace a super feature, it needs to be well integrated into its surroundings, i.e. the overall skatepark.
In attempting to convey to non-skaters and ourselves what makes for a good skatepark, we have long analogized to a golf course. Nobody would think of hiring non-golfers to design a golf course, as there is literally no substitute for personal experience. And no golfer/golf course designer would think of designing a golf course where the layout of the 18 holes repeated itself in any way, shape, or form. By design each hole is unique.
The same rules apply to skatepark design.
The similarities between a golf course and a skatepark continue. Golfers define the quality of the experience over 18 holes. Similarly, skaters judge the quality of the experience based on their interaction with the whole skatepark. In golf you don’t play one hole over and over. At a skatepark you can, of course, skate only one feature but basically nobody does that.
To be sure, a golf course can include one particularly spectacular hole just as a skatepark can include a super feature that grabs everybody’s attention. But one spectacular hole does make not a golf course great, just as one super feature does not make a skatepark great.
I won’t belabor the analogy further; I’m confident you get it.
My problem with the original Gabriel design was that it looked a lot like previous Airspeed work in Oregon. That is, it was one super feature surrounded by a ho-hum design. As I just said, I like super features, but not at the expense of the rest of the park. It doesn’t represent good design because so few skaters will access the double funnel while so many skaters will not (because, frankly, they’re not good enough or not willing to be good enough).
To this point, I offer another analogy. A skatepark is like a sports team. The skatepark is a collection of features whose shared interaction creates the skateboard experience. No one feature defines the experience on its own. A sports team may have a really high scoring player, analogously a skatepark super feature, but scoring points is not enough. You need a high scoring player that also makes the whole team better and leads the championship effort. A player that simply scores a lot of points but fails to make the rest of the team better does not win championships.
A nice example is the recent NBA basketball championship. The San Antonio Spurs, led by superstar Tim Duncan, won the championship. It was (I think) their fourth championship in recent years. Duncan is the consummate team player, a professional on and off the court. Kobe Bryant is probably the best basketball player on earth one-on-one, but basketball is a team sport. Kobe has never won a championship as the leader of his team. He is a walking distraction to the rest of his team, in part because he’s inarguably selfish.
You need a superstar to win the championship, and you arguably need a super feature to be considered one of the best skateparks around. But how well that super feature is integrated into the rest of the park and serves the range of skaters (with their diverse interests and abilities) is really what matters.
Mark Conahan drafted a pretty cool dual track snake run for Gabriel, partly inspired by this Canadian design (yet thankfully updated). I think Mark’s design has a lot of potential. A well integrated super feature would make it even better. That’s what I hope to see from Geth at the next public design meeting.
“super features” = gimmicks. does burnside, newberg, or the old licoln city have any gimmicks? (well i guess there is that spinning thing at newberg) they are great parks because of how well everything goes together. this ridiculous notion of “super features” has resulted in an excess of over-vert. if there must be a “super feature”, does it have to be something you carve upside down in? i think that some of this over-vert craze can be linked to the macho egos of the park builders and to them limiting who can bid on the construction of the parks. not that many skaters are interested though, so let’s shift the focus back to building entirely solid parks. and maybe every once in a while, inspired and unique obstacles can be added to the designs. geth actually built an outstanding feature at the bethel park in eugene. you can launch out of a 5 foot bowl and land in the most beautiful and mellow, rolled-over tranny pocket ever. it is the ideal spot to learn transfers, and if you’re on it you can spin and/or grab and/or go as big as you want.
One of my favorite parks is port angeles. I wouldn’t say there is a gimmick in that one. Pretty “normal” expected terrain, all tied together nicely and expertly finished.
More please.
I agree gimmicks come at the expense of the rest of the park. The whole suffers.
Maybe builders are after a marketing feature? It isn’t as dramatic to compare a double funnel woopdi do with a perfect pool…..perfect pool for me,everytime.
Burnside, riding the pillars or under the bridge at all is a trip.
Lincoln city 1, ride the slate vert wall.
PA does have an oververt pocket, but the best feature of PA to me (is the smooth concrete and nice vert.
Astoria – tight corner and oververt.
Duvall – Aggregate coping.
Tom, I like your analogy. It works for me. Consider how Port Orford’s cradle and LC 2′s cradle can be ridden on both sides. Incorporated into the bowl nicely.
I think of a skatepark as a collection of experiences.
Each obstacle yields a limited number of experiences, no matter how “super” they are. Therefore you must choose what type of experiences you wish to get out of a certain park.
For example, if a bowl or snake run, has tranny that is the same throughout, with the same depths, then it’s rather redundant and repetitive, offering the same experience on one part of the bowl, as the other (boring).
Hence, the need to make the deep end DEEP and the shallow end, well shallow. Completely different experiences. Also, note that if a bowl has features such as tile or a death box or extensions, or stairs, or tight tranny in one area, or pointy hips or round hips or a love seat or is some other shape that we’ve not seen before (such as a Roman). That all adds up to a unique experience for each of the different obstacles.
I don’t know that a park “needs” a super feature to be successful, but it seems to me that a park should offer the users a great diversity of features, that all flow together, with a super one or not.
we all know you want DEEP bowls, dan. when are there going to be enough deep bowls to suit you? do you see how crowded the decent street areas are? plus, i believe that some obstacles yield an unlimited number of experiences. it only becomes boring if you are not trying different tricks.