The H Ramp

Yeah, I know I'm lagging.  My laptop died, so I'm blogging without my own computer right now, which sucks.  Anyhow, October 2015 was the 25th anniversary of the release of my first self-produced BMX video, The Ultimate Weekend, in 1990.  So I'm going to jump ahead to 1990 in this blog, and tell the story of this video, section by section. 

At 2:08 in this clip, after the intro, we get to a mini-ramp.  Seems like a pretty lame section of mostly Keith Treanor, with a bit of John Povah and Alan Valek riding.  What's cool about this section is that I think this is the first time a mini-ramp appeared in any BMX video.  To the best of my knowledge, the first mini-ramp was the Towne Street ramp in Costa Mesa, California, built by a bunch of the Schmitt Stix skaters.  They originally built a 9 foot high vert halfpipe, but the neighbors complained (typical) and the city inspectors came to check out the ramp.  Backyard ramps were really rare in those days, even in California, and the city guys weren't sure what to do about it.  After some research, they realized it wasn't illegal to have a ramp, but it had to be no higher than six feet.  So the skaters chopped the the top three feet of their vert ramp off, and BOOM, the first under vert mini-ramp was born.  They soon realized that an under vert ramp allowed a whole bunch of new tricks to be performed, and the idea caught on.

A year or two later, some skaters in Santa Ana, CA built two mini-ramps side by side, and they had a little spine in between the two so skaters could transfer from one to the other.  The ramps formed a big letter "H", and became known as the H-Ramp.  Skaters from all over came to session it.  Later on it was rebuilt into an "L" shape with a hip, five feet tall as I recall.  Then at one end of the "L" was a larger, six foot mini.  That's the set-up you see in this video.  The reason Keith Treanor does a million tail taps, and not much else, is because this footage was shot on his second of third trip to the H-Ramp.  Keith went on to become a master of mini-ramps, but this was when he was just learning to ride them. 

Other stories about the H-Ramp... My boss, Don Hoffman, at Unreel Productions was shooting footage of Vision skaters there one day when he accidentally stepped off the back edge of the deck.  He fell five feet awkwardly, and the camera slammed him in the face.  That doesn't sound like too big of a deal, but we used 35 pound Betacam cameras then, and Don got worked by that beast.  He looked kinda like the Elephant Man for about a week, and the fall cost about $3,000 damage to the camera and $4,000 to Don's face.  We never let him live that one down. 

Another story there is one time I was riding the ramp with Keith Treanor, John Povah, and Jess Dyrenforth.  At that time, Jess was changing from a BMX rider to an inline skater.  He brought his girlfriend, Angie Walton, to the ramp.  She was also a skater, and was trying to learn some kind of handstand drop-in thing on her blades.  Somehow, I got the job of holding her ankles while she was in the handstand to stabilize her before she tried to drop-in.  I was trying to be a gentleman and not look down her shorts to see her underwear as I did this.  But I wasn't a great gentleman and she had pretty standard issue white underwear on.  If her name sounds familiar, it's because she became a major force in the inline world, publishing a magazine (called Daily Bread, I think) and then she was the main force behind starting the Warped Tour, which was a damn cool idea.