The Cancer Ditch

Back to the 25th annivesary posts about my 1990 video, The Ultimate Weekend.  If you go to 9:54 in the video, you see a quick little night time street session at a place in Huntington Beach many of us called the Slater Ditch.  It's some kind of a pump house or something along a canal that feeds into Bolsa Chica wetlands.  The younger guys, like Andy Mulcahy, whose mug is in this section a couple of times, called it The Cancer Ditch.  They called it that because the water at the bottom of the riding area was so nasty that it would probably give you cancer if you fell in. 

At one time, this had been a well known skate spot, but the city workers built some speed bumps across it to deter skating.  After that it was a place for BMXers to session, usually late at night, like in this video.  Personally, the best I could do was footplant the wall, and jump this little step up on the other side.  In this clip you see Keith Treanor and Randy Lawrence sessioning, while Andy and Sean Johnson look on.  Back in 1990, video cameras could not handle low light well, so I wasn't even sure I could use this footage.  I used the editing system to pump up the video level so it was just barely watchable.  The Stain's quick song, "My Grandma's Got a Mohawk," worked perfectly to end the "Friday Night" phase of the video.  I can't even count how many times I rode this spot in the late 80's and  90's.  Usually alone, but sometimes in groups like this.  The Cancer Ditch is one of those obscure little places that got a little famous because of BMX.