building a skatepark

[youngbuckwithapickuptruck]

so the past few winters i have been driving down to slab city to work on the skatepark while sleeping out the back of my truck. it has been interesting. there used to be a massive bar on site where i could charge my tools, store material, and persuade a number of barflies to help out for handfuls of last seasons pot. the bar burnt down so i rebuilt it. then it burned down again and i am rebuilding it again in an effort to get people hanging out there so i can have some dang help with this project.

i did vanlife out the back of my truck a few years. food on the PassengerSide, thin mattress in the middle, bmx bike stored in DriverSide: eat sleep ride! now that i have a rubbermaid container of ryobi tools, my front seat is usually full

sometimes i need to haul. usually i can throw a tarp over my mattress and haul from there. i used to keep a plywood deck on the roof of my campershell and would regularly haul 250lb up there but some of the welds have started to further crack (i got the alum campershell at cracktents for $50, lol). i make my own concrete by utilizing bags of portland cement, local clean sand and every year the DPW dumps gravel all over town for me to scrape up, lol. to haul this material i can pop my campershell off in about 10 minutes, but usually have to spend another 40minutes organizing all my loose bedroom crap. takes me 15 min to get campershell back on and throw all that stuff back in. sometimes i leave it off for days at a time and at the end of the day, i sweep up the bed and throw the mattress in and sleep under the stars, its nice.

i have a powerbank, sump pump and two 55gal drums i use to pump water from the slab city 'cold shower' its a manhole with marsh filtered water running into it. ill usualy do my laundry and take a shower every water run, lol. i can haul a single drum on my tailgate without popping off the shell, thats nice.

a lot of lumber i got from my campershell buddy at cracktents. he is my former skateboarder roommate ~turned tweaker ~ he dumpsterdives construction sites all night and was providing me endless lumber for a while. each season i would take a few 500mile trips to slabs for home and would throw a cool 750lbs of lumber in the bed + all my stuff.
hes stopped supplying me lumber but i need to focus on concrete ramps anyways, tweakers cant burn those down.

there is very little concrete debris fill material avaialble at slabs so i am going to focus on building ramps usuing forms and hollow backspaces. a neighbor in slabs has a huge fucking pile of bent up rebar and ill just buy new, thin, bendable rebar for the curved pieces of transistion.

its a super fun project and sleeping out the back of the ranger is super comfy. i wake up at about 5am every morning and watch the sunrise, go to coffee at around 7am and see who i can convince to help me later that day.
its been interesting. the more years i do this, the more involved in the community drama i become, uggghhh.

my truck is one of the few vehicles short and high enough to drive in and out of the bowl

 

[alwaysFlOoReD]

Really liked your write up. Where is slab city? I'm not familiar with the states...

 

[Bear in the woods]

so the past few winters i have been driving down to slab city to work on the skatepark while sleeping out the back of my truck. it has been interesting. there used to be a massive bar on site where i could charge my tools, store material, and persuade a number of barflies to help out for handfuls of last seasons pot. the bar burnt down so i rebuilt it. then it burned down again and i am rebuilding it again in an effort to get people hanging out there so i can have some dang help with this project.

i did vanlife out the back of my truck a few years. food on the PassengerSide, thin mattress in the middle, bmx bike stored in DriverSide: eat sleep ride! now that i have a rubbermaid container of ryobi tools, my front seat is usually full

sometimes i need to haul. usually i can throw a tarp over my mattress and haul from there. i used to keep a plywood deck on the roof of my campershell and would regularly haul 250lb up there but some of the welds have started to further crack (i got the alum campershell at cracktents for $50, lol). i make my own concrete by utilizing bags of portland cement, local clean sand and every year the DPW dumps gravel all over town for me to scrape up, lol. to haul this material i can pop my campershell off in about 10 minutes, but usually have to spend another 40minutes organizing all my loose bedroom crap. takes me 15 min to get campershell back on and throw all that stuff back in. sometimes i leave it off for days at a time and at the end of the day, i sweep up the bed and throw the mattress in and sleep under the stars, its nice.

i have a powerbank, sump pump and two 55gal drums i use to pump water from the slab city 'cold shower' its a manhole with marsh filtered water running into it. ill usualy do my laundry and take a shower every water run, lol. i can haul a single drum on my tailgate without popping off the shell, thats nice.

a lot of lumber i got from my campershell buddy at cracktents. he is my former skateboarder roommate ~turned tweaker ~ he dumpsterdives construction sites all night and was providing me endless lumber for a while. each season i would take a few 500mile trips to slabs for home and would throw a cool 750lbs of lumber in the bed + all my stuff.
hes stopped supplying me lumber but i need to focus on concrete ramps anyways, tweakers cant burn those down.

there is very little concrete debris fill material avaialble at slabs so i am going to focus on building ramps usuing forms and hollow backspaces. a neighbor in slabs has a huge fucking pile of bent up rebar and ill just buy new, thin, bendable rebar for the curved pieces of transistion.

its a super fun project and sleeping out the back of the ranger is super comfy. i wake up at about 5am every morning and watch the sunrise, go to coffee at around 7am and see who i can convince to help me later that day.
its been interesting. the more years i do this, the more involved in the community drama i become, uggghhh.

my truck is one of the few vehicles short and high enough to drive in and out of the bowl

The middle of no-where places in the country needs people like you. I grew up in what used to be a very small town. Only legal thing to do around was go to the movies “yawn”. So most of us found a section in the deep woods to play. Which was great. However for many in unsupervisable situations would turn to drugs.
Half of the people I grew up with are hooked on hard drugs, many already dead.
Boredom is our nations biggest killer of youth.

 

[superj]

We had a place like that called twin palms that all the bmx guys would show up to and ride all day. We had a track with tons of serious jumps and a quarter pipe next to a telephone pole we would use to mark who could get the highest.

This was in riverside california in the early to mid 90s.

One of my last memories there is one of the guys from redline showing up on a test bike and kiling everyone's highest mark on the pole. He was riding the test bike predecessor of the rumblefish.