Skate Reanimate

I traveled to the Bay Area this week for business, and had the chance to skate both the Pacifica skate park and the San Jose Lake Cunningham park. The locals were busy at Pacifica as usual, and I still love the mellow vibe and smooth transitions of that park. Lake Cunningham was hopping, but I was able to find relative solitude in the giant skull bowl as well as the full pipe, and, surprisingly, the 5′ bowl on the East side.

I really dug this 5′ bowl. It’s just my size for mini-ramp style tricks, and has enough of the bowl feel to keep it interesting. The worst traffic here was the occasional biker crossing through on a larger run.

I missed my window of opportunity for today’s workshop, so I drove South East to San Jose and checked out the world famous Cunningham Lake park. It was a pain to park my rental car (I parked on a street on the North side to avoid a $6 charge), but the park itself was pretty well vacant, leaving me my choice of terrain.

And what terrain there is! Some amazing, bad-a bowls with cement texture mimicking tile, and pool coping all around. But the thing to visit for has got to be the full pipe, which is probably 15 feet high or more, and slopes you down into a long, beautiful, three-level bowl. Carving through the full-pipe was an experience unlike anything in skateboarding. It’s hard to believe one can control that much speed.