Signal Hill History
It’s that time of the week again, making up for lost time and pushing the envelope of freshness dating. The Los Angeles Times has a nice historical piece on the Signal Hill Speed Run that has a lot of interesting tidbits of information. For instance, I had read that one year a previously non-skating longshoreman showed up to enter, but I wasn’t aware that he blew off his daughter’s baptism to compete. This article also goes into more detail on some of the hair raising crashes that took place. The amount of mayhem that took place is pretty amazing. In today’s litigation heavy insurance risk climate, that race wouldn’t have made it past the second run of the first year. Yes, this is skateboarding. The picture on the left is John Hutson from Thrasher Magazine of January 1981. The shot of Hutson was actually taken at a different race on the Laguna Seca road racing course in 1980, (Signal Hill officially ended in ’79) Hutson was a first place finisher at both. The shot on the right was poached from Vetter design. Check out the L.A. Times article Board out of their minds. Free registration may be required.
[Source: SkateDaily]
Signal Hill quite mellow, compared to Chantry, or Glendora Mountain road…
…or Rist Canyon outside Fort Collins, CO.
They were flirting with 80 mph this fall, before the snow came.
Someone was purportedly clocked by a radar gun at 81 mph during the downhill races at Tetunoia, Brazil in October. The race was won by Kevin Reimer who was the guy who had just clocked into the high 70’s (GPS) at Rist Canyon a couple of weeks before that.
Here is a link to an interview with the guys who did the recent Rist Canyon runs:
http://tinyurl.com/3c72q3