SOTW 1-7-13: Wooden Wave

John Egertson enjoyed these photos, and it led him to send in this week’s Shot of the Week.

I loved that post about the ramp out in the desert made of old signs and poached lumber. Got me thinking of two great ramps we road back in the day… The “wooden wave” was a sketchy, shaky thing built on a public sidewalk by the Duke Street / Telegraph Road overpass in Alexandria, VA. It was built entirely from scraps of lumber found here and there by my friend Dave Alexander. The photo attached is Dave, probably around 1980, taken from up on the overpass. You can see the ramp is not a classic beauty, but it was way fun. The top piece of ply was over vert. It lasted a week or two before someone torched it.

Wooden Wave really was ridiculous. It truly was 16 feet tall as painted on there, and over vertical. You can see that Dave painted on some faux tiles and then after that decided to stick another piece of ply up there to make it taller. Despite the photo, Dave Alexander, his brother Mike and myself all got close to the top of that ramp, at least half way up the last piece of plywood. The sidewalk leading to it was fairly steep so we were really flying when we hit it, and the whole thing would just shake. Funny that rather than some public works crew from the City removing it, some delinquents just set it on fire one night… Every good skate spot meets its demise, the best ones usually go the quickest.

Bonus ramp after the jump.

The second ramp was pretty well constructed. It was in someone’s yard in Charlottesville, VA around 1984. It was in Carrsbrook Subdivision, so we just called it “Carrsbrook.” It was a quarter pipe with a good bit of vert and it has a plywood run-up across the yard to it, ala mega ramp style. The photo attached is me.