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Arizona Road Trip By Dantallica – May 2005
So I had a whole week off and decided to make the 23 hour drive down south to Tucson AZ where my friend Enrique Felipes just moved. He had been telling me tales of ditches and long downhill streets and I knew of all the parks near Phoenix so I packed up the family and headed down south.
Day 1 With the possibility of rain in the forecast for days 2-4 we decided to take part of the afternoon of a sure day to drive up to the Phoenix area to hit a couple of parks. Our first stop was Coolidge, a small town off the beaten path, which offered a Site Design park for our pleasure. The park was easy to find and we probably had the most fun here out of any of the parks we skated that whole day. The place consists of a fun bowl about 4 feet tall in the shallow and about 8 in the deep with some good steep transitions and steel coping. This bowl felt a lot like a real pool since it was kind of inconsistent in its construction. Some of the walls were steeper than others but it flowed really nicely and was a challenge to do some basic tricks in. The other half of the park is a small street course with some big banks, rails and ledges, pretty standard design and it was very functional. This place felt a lot like the Donald, OR park, small town, bowl, no daycare center feel. We stayed here for a good hour before we decided to head a little farther north to check out Chandler and Gilbert. On the way out of town we stopped at the Safeway for some supplies and the checkout girl practically threw herself at Enrique, I thought she was gonna skip work and come home with us, too bad your married bro. It must be nice to be a 6′ 5″ blond headed guy cuz the girls are always flirting with this dude.
Our next stop was Chandler, I had wanted to stop here to ride the park and compare it with what I had felt about the place 5 years ago when I first skated it. Man I was blown away by how much flatbottom everything has and how lumpy and slow the bowls are. (again I realized how good we have it here in the NW). The last time I was there I thought it was the greatest place ever, its good to see that parks are evolving in general design and that Site Design Group is improving their skills. The park was fun for a little while but we didn’t stay long since it was more like a daycare center than a skatepark, next time I wont go at 2 in the afternoon during spring break week.
Gilbert was the final stop of the day, that Arizona sun was brutal on me, I had to be the whitest dude there and I was definitely the only one wearing a straw hat so my delicate skin would not get burnt. Gilbert was a rad park with some really fun bowls, the street course was kind of standard and flowed pretty much back and forth. My favorite obstacle was the 30 foot long curved bench at one side of the park, I tried and tried to grind the entire thing but I always seemed to run out of speed with about 2 feet left, one time I pushed through the grind which made a few local kids scratch their heads. The bowls were really a lot of fun especially the telephone bowl, it was nice and tight with good transitions and nice depths, any pool/vert dog would have fun in it. The other bowl section was a spined pair of bowls with a couple of extensions and some fast carve lines, I would have liked to stay there longer and figure this one out but I was exhausted. It’s amazing how many cops we saw at this park and Chandler, they seemed to be lurking around every time I looked up. Beer consumption definitely had to be under the radar.
Day 2 We started the morning off with a wake and bake and by doing some longboarding around the neighborhood which quickly turned into a pool hunt. We were able to spot quite a few pools but unfortunately only one that was empty and the owner happened to be building a fence next to it at the time so we were out of luck. Nonetheless longboarding through the neighborhoods was a blast since everything was downhill and all the curbs are small carvable banks. After longboarding we went back to get the car and hit some small ditches built into some neighborhoods, these were the most fun yet. Some of these dtches were kind of hidden in between houses and fenced off with no skateboarding signs. The kids in this hood were damn lucky to have these ditches built right between their houses, we had some good fun there.
In the afternoon we went to a pre-season baseball game where we proceeded to drink enough beer that the only skating we were able to do the rest of the day was to cruise the hood on longboards and try to scope out some more pools. During this session we took a walk out into the desert for a smoke break and came across a jackrabbit. This thing looked huge, it had to be about 2.5 feet tall with the ears up, I was amazed since I’d never seen one, the desert is weird.
Day 3 To start the day off we headed down to the pet store for some dog food and spotted a nice looking ditch near the shopping center. This ditch curved around a corner going downhill and at one spot it had a nice roll-in to pick up a ton of speed on and get high up on the steep walls. After skating it for about 25 minutes we decided to split since the cleaning ladies across the street were getting suspicious. From here we decided to make a short drive to check out the little park in Marana. Marana is one of those parks that could have been good except everything is way too small to be of any challenge and many of the street elements block lines that could be had in the flow area. The coping was insanely slick as well, obviously someone went wild with the wax. Needless to say we didn’t stay for more than 20 minutes.
Day 4 Early in the morning we made the trek up to Mt. Lemmon to some site seeing and we stopped at a Mexican place in Tucson for lunch. While leaving the parking lot we noticed a number of run-down motels on this street so we did some pool hunting. Several of the pools looked skateable but most of them had a couple of feet of water in the deep ends and there were many sketchy people hanging around the motels so we decided against trying to bucket them out, maybe next time. Later in the day we decided to get in some more longboarding, we found a nice bike trail that sloped downhill for about 4 miles. This had to be the most fun that we had all week, the hill was fast in spots and slower in others but it there was basically no pushing needed. We spent about 3 hours doing downhill runs and finishing off some beers that we brought along. About halfway through the session we pondered the idea of heading to the YMCA park in Tucson but decided against it since it’s a pay to play park and we were having a blast bombing hills.
Arizona is a rad place to skate, not only are there good parks (some of which I missed this time around) but there’s lots of other types of terrain to find there such as pools and ditches. If I didn’t already live in a skaters paradise I’d consider moving to AZ. I’m not sure which is worse, the 5 months of rain in the NW or the scorching heat of AZ but I was sure glad to see rain the day I got home. Get yourself down south and experience some desert style skating, you won’ t regret it
– Dantallica
Arizona Road Trip By Dantallica – May 2005
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