Idaho Road Trip

Hailey

Hailey Idaho is, well you know… Hailey. There is a reason so many skaters go out of their way to travel to this behemoth. It’s kind of like the Stonehenge of skateparks. The deep is really deep at 14ft., and then there’ s the whole rolling over the top of the full pipe that can give you speed wobbles on the way down. You can’t just stop by Hailey and skate for an hour or so and expect to “get it”. You really need to spend a couple of days there, at least at my skill level.

And speaking of Stonhenge, the other tourist attraction that Hailey has going for it, almost like Longview’s Jake the Alligator Man, is the man with the plan, who will not stop telling you about it for even a few minutes,. The One. The Only… Slackjack! He’s like the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot, only instead of trying to find him, he finds you. Yes, he’s been kicked out of one or two discussion boards and has his detractors, but deep down he’s just a poor misunderstood individual who wants a hug. Slackjack may have only been skating for two years, but that won’t stop him from showing you the line up and over the ful pipe, or from making fun of people who push mongo. He took us to a good restaurant and a good camp site and never knew how close he came to being decked by one of our extended crew with whom he had, shall we say, a personality clash.

In person he goes by just plain Jack. He rides a big stick, and the local hippie ladies seem to dig him, as witnessed by the van “guest” who accidentally showed us the money shot when the wind picked up at the park.

In the “Ripley’s Believe It Or Not!” file goes two individuals that we hooked up with in Hailey, but not in the same sense as Jack’s hook up. One of them was a childhood friend of Mark Conahan’s who he hadn’t seen in years. (Mark: Kid’s name was John Cortum. I used to skate more with his older brother Curt who was a really good pipe skater. I can’t find him on Google except as part of a Peruvian Dance company. That’s him, John said he was a musician in the Bay area.) Another was a Chicago area transplant to Boise named Tom Kilroy. The weird thing is that we were both at a 1985 show where the Faction played in someone’s garage in the suburbs of Chicago, and he and his crew maintained another small vert ramp in Darien Illinois in a field behind a Taco Bell. I had been to that ramp several times but always found it deserted. So although our paths crossed a couple of times in the mid eighties back in Chicagoland, we would not meet until 20 years later in Hailey Idaho. This further goes to prove Steve Grover’s theory that if you are older than 30 and still skateboarding you will eventually meet everyone else that is in the same demographic.

This is the part where I talk about Mark the trick monkey and how pompous he was, demanding that I set up and photograph him over and over doing the same trick until I got a shot that met his high standards. In reality it was me who made Mark act like a trick monkey and insist that we go back to the park in the evening in hopes of re-capturing an earlier shot in better lighting and a vertical orientation in hopes of landing a cover shot for Concrete Wave. He felt like an ass cause we rolled up to the park and tried the same thing 10 times for the camera then split. Meanwhile a local guy was killing it and I didn’t even snap him. Mark felt like such a kook that he had to go over to the kid and explain that he wasn’t a prima donna or a kook, thereby ensuring that the kid thought he was. Meanwhile I feel like an ass cause the shot isn’t exposed well enough for a cover and is only going to be used in some Canada-only minimally distributed and very thin publication, thereby cementing my reputation as a C-list skate photographer. But not some, apparently, cause we also met Mike Mira who runs Skatehailey.com where I am known as the annoying guy with the flash. Seriously, it’s a scientific fact that the flash from a camera will add an extra 2% stoke to the average rider. I’m doing you a favor by ambushing you with a blinding light. Imagine if I actually knew how to use it.

So we were all pretty burnt out as it came time to roll out of town. We had a few half hearted runs around the park, made the last of the obligatory Demi Moore/Bruce Willis jokes. (His diner has good food but crappy service.) and got in the cars to head for Kuna.

Kuna, Idaho

Kuna. Man, those kids are like feral animals there. Dave and Mark arrived first to find that some tools had used the bowls as a fireworks launching pad. Fortunately someone had a broom and a couple of local kids helped sweep it out. Again, it was a million and a half degrees out there. I put my hand on the coping and would have blistered it if I hadn’t pulled it away quickly. Yes sir-ee, it’s not the heat but the humidity. Yeah right. It was dryer and hotter than hell. We didn’t have much of a session there but even so, what a fun park! It’s hard to tell from the photos, but it’s essentially a snake run that empties into a bowl. The overall square footage of this park is small, but the fun it contains is out of proportion. I wish it was in our town. It’s perfect for one of the small “skate spots” as planned for in Portland’s satellite skate parks scheme. Even if you had to sacrifice the deep end for more shallow snake run.

Getting back to the feral animals, for some reason this park was in the middle of nowhere again, adjacent to a BMX track with a gnarly series of jumps that looked painful to all but the most skilled. Shortly after we started skating all these kids appeared out of nowhere and started throwing fireworks all over the place and trying to step on them as they went off or wrestling with each other and generally acting like crazy caged monkeys. It was amusing in a “glad I don’t have to put up with this” kind of way. Local John Johnson (That’s his name, I swear) was about the only one seriously skating besides Mark, of course.

Kuna. Fun. Time to drive home. No plane ticket for me. Our trip was a success, but not without injuries. Dave Spaar had broken his wrist and Ryan Hass broke a finger but what’s a few broken bones? The rest of us were fine. I was feeling good about being able to find the speed to roll up and over the full pipe in Hailey thanks to Jack, and even better about making it over the love seat in the same run. I was feeling less than manly about my inability to air over the coping in the deep end. Apparently, it takes a girl to do a man’s job, which makes me a boy, and her a woman. Or whatever.

I can’t leave you with another “worst panorama ever” like the one above. The pictures below are linked to sites with more pictures and musings from our trip. Mark’s blog has a good Idaho category and Ryan posted a bunch of panoramas and a few pics and movies. True story. Shawn overheard a conversation by some kids at Hailey who were watching Ryan and Kyle check out the park. One kid: “I think those guys are old school.” Other kid: “I think those guys are lovers.” (From Mark Conahan: That was actually Jack talking to a kid at Hailey. Jack said he bet they were skaters even though they were just walking around the park – {holding hands and giggling} and the 12 or 14 year-old said he bet they were lovers. Haw! That and Jack’s comment about how retarded girls with big tits were kind of hot are vying for quotation of the week. ) Ouch! Ryan, you’re not doing much for your cause with your “happy” design scheme. And speaking of panoramas, I think that idea is a little tired. I move that we start making skate dioramas instead. Don’t forget to check out Skatehailey.com.

You can make the trip from Portland to Hailey in 7 hours with only moderate speeding. Actually, we spent way too much time at truck stop waiting for crappy root beer floats at an A&W manned by high school drop outs. We also tried to catch the tail end of the Maryhill Speedbaording Championships in Oregon seeing as how we had to drive by it anyway. Seriously though, speedboarding? What happened to calling it Downhill? Must we re-name everything like wheelie to manuals for no apparent reason? I guess if you organize the event you can call it whatever you want. We couldn’t find it because it was over and we didn’t have any info in the car. The closest we got was passing the Oust team bus crossing back over the bridge into Oregon. We also missed Tom Inouyes park slalom event in our own West Linn Oregon that was scheduled the previous day. Who knows when we’ll make it back, but it sure was fun. If you go, bring some water for the days and your warmest sleeping bag for the nights. And say hello to Slackjack for us. Don’t worry, he’ll find you.