Hot Soup & Coffee

“El Barrio Bowl” is the perfect bowl to skate if you want to get some serious speed lines in. With this in mind we decided to create an event that would be easy, fun and cheap for everyone to get involved with. Throw in some food, tunes, brews, and shitty prizes… we’ve got a party!

The weekend of May 12th is a centralized date for a few birthdays within our clan of skaters, so we wanted to have a get-together regardless. We also wanted to throw the event with little to no notice beforehand to make it more renegade and to see what type of turn out we could get.

HotSoup&Coffee has teamed up with Old Man Army Skateboards to get this event rolling. With no real agenda we will be at “El Barrio Bowl” (aka, Tempe II / Tempe New / Victory Acres / Esquire Park) before noon on May 12th getting things set up. We will be cooking burgers and dogs. Beer will be consumed. Tunes will be played. Shredding will take place.

Everyone is welcome to attend and participate. We will be doing radar/timed (TBD) speed runs through the bowl, offering up prize packs for 3rd/2nd/1st and lady’s bracket (get out here girls!). For anyone wanting to get extra silly, we will also do a Best Trick. Having this be a jam or an entire day thing is still to be determined.

Please bring anything you can to help this be a pot luck. As mentioned above, there will be some food and beer. Please bring anything else. Questions or comments can be posted here at HotSoupandCoffee.com and/or at the Facebook event page.

Wow! Almost two whole months and NO (zero) posts to this blog. What seemed like was going to be a weekly updated project got pushed back continuously. I had the initial idea to start filming session videos and then adding a little write up about what was skated from the passed week; well, that didn’t happen. Lots of hilarity and hijinx went down each week, but little to no clips were getting shot, so I decided to hold off making another video until I did have enough to make it legit. Little did I know it would be 8 weeks of sessions later that I could start editing.

Thursday night sessions have become a weekly staple with our crew. We started hitting a random park every week and came up lucky many times with empty parks, lots of good skating, and general good times with whomever came out. This definitely has kept us busy. This blog is about skateboarding in Arizona, and was technically started when having hot soup and coffee at a session would be intolerable, but as Fall settled into the valley, we had cool weather, rain and wind to contend with. Plus, Russell’s car (White Lightning) only had one working window and those unfortunate enough to have to sit in the back got pelted with wind and rain at 80mph down the freeway. Generally these conditions aided in keeping people out of the parks because they figured it would be too wet to skate. Only once did we show up to the park and were almost rained out. Luckily we stuck it out and the park dried up. Completely empty.

A random Sunday session was called but we were forced inside by rain. A couple hour session at Kids That Rip (KTR) was in order and a lot of fun. Relatively uncrowded and not super expensive for a half-session. The bowl there is big and there are lots of long grinds to be had. We didn’t have as much time as we would have liked, so I was only able to get a few clips recorded before the place closed for the day. I can tell why this place has put out a bunch of groms that shred. You almost feel like you can try anything here without getting too busted up. Plus sliding out with kneepads on wood is exciting.

A new member of our crew, Vince, moved to town right around Thanksgiving. Vince is Russell’s younger brother, and was showing only a minor interest in skating with us at first. We decided he needed to hit a backyard pool or two to raise his stoke level. After a few modest scum-liners he was busting full-on front-slashers in the deep end; giving his older brother a run for his money. We immediately knew we had another tranny skater amongst us and it was time to get him to some parks to really open it up. He bought himself some new gear and immersed himself into our world.

So after nearly three months of collecting footage I’m out of stories that I remember, but I did manage to edit together a video of what went down. Thanks to Michael Cornelius and The Father Figures for granting me permission to use their song in the video. I found it fitting. Also thanks to Chuck, Ryan, Myke, Josh, Nick and Russell for holding the camera when it was my turn to look foolish on video.

Last January (2011) we decided to take matters into our own hands and use the unused space under the oak tree in my backyard to house a miniramp. Luckily the tree offers enough shade to hide from the direct sun. Having a close place to skate when it’s 110 outside is crucial. I had always wanted a ramp of my own in my yard, so once the opportunity was there, we jumped on it. Some heavy duty pallets, a giant piece of metal piping to be used for coping, and a few sheets of 1/2″ plywood were donated to the cause and we rallied the rest of the fundage together to get the finishing pieces. Now it was just the matter of the build. Chuck and Russell had built ramps before, so we broke off into two 2-man teams to level the flatbottom and to draw and cut the templates for the transitions.

Day 1 ended with basically a complete ramp. The bottom sheets were laid and we took our first few pumps and turns on the walls.

Day 2 gave us the time to set the coping and prepare the decks. Right as we finished putting on the coping I heard, “Hey! How do you open the gate!?” coming from over the fence. I wasn’t sure who it was, but then they said, “Can we bring this keg back here?” We had just finished the last of the beers we bought, so, “Yeah, get back here!” we told them. An impromptu party ensued and we got our first grinds on the newly placed coping.

Day 3 we were quick to set the decks up and to hang the lighting over the patio. A 4-bulb shop light is hung at an angle to perfectly light up the ramp with no shadows. Shredding into the wee-hours is not an issue. Our original plan has been (and still is) to lay pool coping on one side of the ramp, so we have had a “smaller” piece of coping on the east side of the ramp that will eventually get replaced once we pour some concrete for pool coping. The west side of the ramp, with the big piece of coping, has been deemed the “bidness end”, as that’s where tricks count. The decking was finished on this side and the coping is definitely relentless by not letting you away with any hang-ups.

Prior to the ramp being built here, Russell dubbed our little compound at 66 1/2 “Bohemia”, as our residents tend to be pretty laid-back, easy going people who basically act as a commune. This made the ramp easy to name the “Bohemian Ramp” and a slight nod to Queen by calling it “Bohemian Ramp City”.

Many days and nights of skating the ramp have gone down since the ramp was built. A ton of tricks, gnarly slams (one with me being pitched over the deck and onto the backside of the ramp, THUD!), first-timer drop-ins, passed out homies, and babies and dogs climbing transitions have all come out of having some wood pieced together so strategically. The video below is documenting the build from ground-breaking to coping grinding. More and more content will come from the ramp, but for now here is a video of the first few days.

Building of the Bohemian Ramp

Thank you to Grave Danger for the music track.

My birthday fell on a Thursday this year (9/29/2011), which worked out perfectly as we generally have skate night on Thursday nights. This year I took a half-day at work so we would have some daylight to skate some pools we haven’t been to in a couple of months. The plan was then to skate a park at night.

After skating the Bohemian ramp with the extension, I was standing at 5 of 30 grinds I was to do for my 30th birthday. We then headed to Charlotte’s Pool (a long-time permission with “Anthony” coping) to try my luck out there. Fun pool, not easy to grind. The Anthony coping sticks out (and up) a good 3 inches. It can be done though, it just wasn’t happening for me that day.

Next we went to one kidney that had been a favorite of ours known as “the Fast-times Pool” because of it’s ultra smooth surface and nice tight pockets. We unfortunately found it had been filled with water. Still no one living in the house, but pool too full to empty with the few buckets we cruise out with.

We then found our way to a pool we’d dubbed “the Humpty Pool” for it’s weird hump drains in various spots on the surface. Once you find your way around these, you can’t even notice them. We were still getting the hang of the ride when it was time to get out of there. I did manage to get some grindage, but I took my share of bails while I was at it.

Our good friend (and HSAC contributor) Chuck took the evening off work to come skate and film with us. I was armed with the hotsoupandcoffee point-and-shoot camera, while Chuck brought along the professional gear to properly document the entire days’ festivities. I am posting some of the stills I was able to take from video footage, and I have compiled the footage I took of skating pools into the video posted below. Please view, review, comment and complain.

Thank you to: Chuck, Nick, Russell, Miguel, Lox, Ryan and Katreena, Chloe, Zack and Angie and anyone else who wished me a happy birthday. It was awesome!

More footage coming sometime soon…

We really should have known better… Even before we got out of the car I said, “Yeah rollerbladers everywhere.” We still packed into the park and set up our gear near the back bowl of Tempe park. Many, many rollerbladers and little scooter kids were infesting the bowl with no regard to sessioning, aka “taking turns”. I padded up and awaited my first run as I watched a couple of little kids on their scooters scootin’ aimlessly in the flat bottom of the bowl. As they both started to leave the bowl area I decided it was a good time to take my turn; well, I guess the little dudes didn’t see it that way and as quickly as he scooted out of the bowl, he turned around to go right back in, clipping the front of his scooter on my board. “Luckily the little dude is wearing a helmet.” I thought as he hit the ground. Before I could even say anything to him he was back up saying, “I’m okay!” Whew… I told him we all need to watch out and that we’re going to take turns. He and his buddy just took off and rolled elsewhere for the duration.

Probably only a good thirty minutes into the session and I was trying to get some grindage on the pool coping clam-shell. This thing is showing some serious neglect. What’s the point of the coping if there’s an inch wide gap between each 16 inch slab? Back truck, on. Front truck, on and going for a gap. I flew off banging my shin/ankle on the coping before sliding down the tranny.

Russell got a picture of it moments after I wobbled out of the bowl.

After this I wasn’t feeling like I wanted to keep fighting for runs at this park, and it was time to go.

What’s nice about skating Tempe park is that if it’s really busy, or we’re just tired of it, Pecos is only right up the street. We packed out of Tempe and headed towards Pecos. Upon arriving at Pecos park we immediately noticed the dramatic difference from where we’d just been. Only 4 other skaters were in the park! We basically had the place to ourselves. I was definitely just on a cruisin’ mission now. Fast lines and a few grinds. Trying to keep my front foot planted on the board the entire time. All-in-all, a fun relaxing session.

Somehow or another we got on the subject of bombing ditches and bombing hills when Russell says, “That one long hill is just right up the street. We should go hit it!” and he was getting all excited. I hadn’t been to the spot in probably 7 years, and I’ve got lost trying to find it again ever since then. He assured me he knew how to get there. We took a roundabout way to get there, but we found it. It’s a massive hill through some houses that starts with a cul-de-sac all the way at the top. Steep, turn, steeper, sharper turn, straight on until morning…. NEVERLAND! All while riding in mostly the pitch black of an Ahwatukee Foothills night. Hauling ass on street with slick park wheels; Russell’s lucky to have survived. I tried to start shooting video of the ride, but realized right away it wasn’t going to happen as I rapidly started to pick up speed. We made it to the bottom and we were totally jacked to do it again, so we hiked our way back up for another run. Two solid runs and we were ready to call it a night without doing any further damage to our already injured carcasses.

Kind of bummed that I wasn’t able to get any footage of skating for this post, but I’ll post a picture of the little snake we helped off the road while hiking up the hill, in a later post.

Call it what you will; the burrito bowl, Tempe II, or Tempe New. We call it “El Barrio Bowl” as it’s in el barrio, on the east side of Tempe. Things can get a little sketchy over there as many wandering vagrants tend to use the park as their personal motel room, plus the menacing lots adjacent to the park generally have 3-4 rough looking families meandering from house to park and back. They generally will leave us alone as we post up on the sub-box in a well lit area.

It’s always a surprise to see what newly painted graffiti will be within the bowl. A few weeks ago it was a giant cock’n'balls spanning from one end of the bowl, over the middle hump, and ended off at the head at the base of the clam-shell. Thanks to whomever did that. The feeling of being a lonely sperm goes through you as you roll up the clam. Wait… that sounded almost naughty. I digress.

Another few notable things about this bowl are 1) chances are high there will be numerous bmx dudes waiting to take runs here as well. This is usually a non-issue if everyone is minding their business and know how to keep the flow going. 2) This is the best place to go if you’ve been rained out of every other park in the area, even though the rain has technically ceased. It seems that there is a giant pump in the drain of the bowl. We’ve skated here when the sidewalks were still wet, but the bowl was bone dry. 3) The coping here has come up a few times as being “no-ping” or “sticky”. I have experienced the stickiness of the coping myself. A little wax here and there will fix that right up, even though it is odd to wax metal coping, which is frowned upon 9 out of 10 times. This is the exception.

We definitely dedicate at least one weekday evening to skating. Wednesday’s are not usually that day, but we’ll take it if the opportunity is there. Nick and I skated the ramp at my place for a little while then headed down the road to the bowl. Unfortunately the battery on my camera died almost immediately once I started shooting, but I was able to get a couple of clips of the first few attempts I took at the clam-shell. Enjoy.

After feeling like I was somehow mentally holding myself back from really charging bigger terrain, I decided it was time to start wearing knee pads when skating tranny. That and the fact that I turn 30 this month, I’m not into hyper-extending my knees when running out of near vert from 12 feet up.

This being said, the last trip we took out to the Goodyear park I was determined to get some grind-love in the deep-end of the peanut bowl. After a couple solid grinders in the shallow and a few nice slashers in the deep, it was on!

While most of the United States is buried in snow, we in Arizona enjoy sunny skies and highs in the 70′s. But, while the rest of the country is having what is called “Summer”, with moderately warm temperatures, we in Arizona are getting baked by the sun with 115 degree days and 110 degree nights. Still, we managed to persevere our form of summer by scoping and skating pools by day and skating parks by night. This blog will feature friends and friends of friends who raise the stoke factor which keeps us at it everyday. Enjoy.