By Kilwag 4-28-05

So I had the opportunity to spend a nice quite, romantic getaway with my pregnant wife in Beautiful Palm Springs California. Unfortunately, there was a skatepark there, which ruined everything. Instead of sunset strolls in the dessert oasis, we had sunset photo sessions in abandoned empty pools. But seriously folks… Palm Springs has a bitchin skatepark built by Site Design Group, and they did it right. The “street” area has some nice banks, and lots of tranny with some ledges and stairs around the outside. Not exactly a street plaza, but be fun enough for street, bowl, beginners and advanced skaters to all enjoy. The other bowled area varies in depth from around 5ft in the shallow to plenty deep in the deep end and the pocket extension.  That’s right, I didn’t do a good job of surveying, but here’s a picture to help you gage. The shallow waterfalls into the deep. Rounded corners everywhere with the exception of one sharp hip. Metal coping except for pool coping complete with tile in the extended pocket. The jewel of the park is a Nude bowl replica, but it seems smaller than it does in my memories. Check out the two photos of the tribute and the original.

Locals? I met a couple, but it seemed like the visitors far outnumbered the locals. In fact there was a contingent visiting all the way from the UK on their annual skate trip in the colonies. They were staying with some guys that they knew via internet magic of Middle Age Shred, which has separate UK and US sites. Most visitors were from closer regions. Apparently I just missed the Cohort Skates crew by a half an hour on either side of their visit, but Chris sent me a couple pics from the day that I was there. Everyone was pretty friendly, and the park was generally less than crowded. And it’s not even summer yet. The heat beat down on me as cloud dwelling Northwesterner, but it wasn’t that bad. There are supposedly three skateshops in town, but Industry seems to be the only one anyone could tell me about.

It costs 5$ a day to skate. You get a wrist band and can enter and exit as often as you want, except if it rains they might not reopen. In Oregon we’re used to sitting out the rains on the off chance that it will dry up again, cause it often does. In Palm Springs, even though it’s arid, once it rains too much to skate, they close it down for the rest of the day. Some kids showed up and got to skate less than five minutes before the park got shut down and they were out 5 bucks. Helmets and full pads are required, but only the helmet rule is enforced with any regularity.  You could skate with cutoff socks or nothing for elbow pads,  and knee pads, but if the helmet came off the very bored security guard would stop watching his portable TV long enough to amble over and request the helmet. Of course, my experiences only come from a 4 day trial. Your results may vary.

Empty pools? The very first time I decided to look behind a wall I found one. It was a square pool and pretty much a one hitter, but skating a pool is almost always more fun than not skating a pool, no matter how good it is.  I made a few other passive attempts to find pools and spotted another potentially fun ride from the street. Unfortunately, it must have been ridden heavily at one point because someone had gone through the trouble to scar the entire surface with a backhoe, leaving only the tile, coping, and a single tile bearing the pool’s maker. Seems like a lot of trouble to go through to make a pool un-rideable. I don’t think it can be resurfaced for swimming, but maybe some of you more experienced pool pirates can provide more background. Although Palm Springs is a destination for the rich and frivolous of L.A. and a bit of an expensive tourist trap at times, there are an awful lot of vacant buildings on the main strip, and more than the usual amount of boarded up homes. Take that to mean what you will.

Ditches: There are ditches around town and the surrounding areas. I didn’t check any of them out much besides taking a picture, but there were some piddly streams in them, probably because of recent rains. This is nothing like Arizona or New Mexico,  but I’d imagine it wouldn’t be too hard to have some fun with a longboard and a set of soft wheels. Also of note are the “Bank banks” which may have a different name to the locals, but they are banks on a building that is a bank, hence the name.  There is an on site security guard, so it’s undoubtedly a bust.

Whoo hoo! Palm Springs! Spring break! Uh yeah. Definitely worth checking out. A very fun park. You could spend a weekend without getting bored, skate wise.  I still have some comprehension problems with the pay-to-play issues. For example, you could spend all day on the surrounding basketball, tennis and baseball facilities for free, but for some reason you need to pay a slacking security guard to make sure you wear a portion of your required safety gear. I think the parents in the area tend to think of it as day care, a nice supervised place where you can drop off your kids. I’d be surprised if the guards had even taken a rudimentary first aid class. Come on people, if a city like Louisville KENTUCKY can be progressive about a 24 hour a day unsupervised skate park, certainly California should be able to get it’s act together, for Hosoi’s sake.  What? Oh yeah. Go skate Palm Springs! See ya next year.

kilwag

photo © Skate and Annoy except where noted.