Magnolia Jumps

Last October was the 25th anniversary of my 1990 video, The Ultimate Weekend.  I'm continuing on with the look back at it, today at 14:00 in the clip above. 

Jumps.  When most of us look back to the early days of riding our bikes, even before many of us knew about BMX, there were the jumps.  There's just something amazing about taking a bicycle, made for human powered transportation on the ground, and making it fly.  That second or two of  weightlessness somehow makes us seem like we are getting away with something.  We jump our bikes and get a momentary reprieve from the Law of Gravity.

There had been a lot of jumps built in an around the Huntington Beach, California area.  I've heard tales that Greg Hill and other legendary racers hit jumps in the Bolsa Chica mesa area of northern H.B. in the late 70's and early 80's.  When I moved to H.B. in 1987, there were jumps at Hidden Valley, nestled in an actual little hidden valley (hence the name) behind the shopping center at Beach and Adams.  Those jumps are great in the winter, when many other places flood, and they were around in 1990, though not as elaborate as they are today.

The best known jumps in 1990 were at Magnolia, in the wetlands just south of the big power plant on Pacific Coast Highway.  So that's where this little session took place.  Sheep Hills, the now infamous jumps of that area, weren't built until about a year after this video was made.  We start off this session with a local kid named Mike jumping the style jump.  Rhythm sections had yet to take over.  In 1990, most jumps were trails where you pedaled a lot then hit the jump.  The style jump was 14 1/2 feet tip to tip, and happened to be the biggest double jump I , personally, have ever jumped.  In this clip we see Mike bust a one hander over it.  Keith Treanor does a 360 over it, and that was a pretty big jump to 360 in those days.  John Povah jumps it, and then gets pissed when he can't pull some trick over it.  We've all thrown and maybe even kicked our bikes in frustration at times.   But when John kicked his bike in this clip, he hurt his foot... for a month.  Sometimes it's the stupid things that get you hurt.

The guy with no shirt is a guy we met out there that day.  He said his name was Luke and he'd just come back from the Marines as I recall.  I think this may actually be the guy we know as Carter Holland today, but I'm not totally sure. 

After the style jump, we see a dork session of the guys doing a bunch of different variations over a little bump.  Nowadays, this kind of thing would never make it into a video.  But I specifically put this in to show our lifestyle of riding then.  We weren't always doing the biggest, baddest, most technical tricks.  Dork sessions were a fun and normal part of riding, and I wanted that in my video. 

Then we hit a flyout jump up on the canal bank.  At that time, I'd been trying bunnyhop tailwhips for about three years, and never landed a clean one.  I did manage a few toe-dragger bunnyhop tailwhips in late 1989, but never got the trick dialed.  Bill Nitschke brought that trick to us later that year.  But the idea of tailwhip jumps was out there, and we were all trying them... and not landing them.  On any given day of riding at the Huntington Beach Pier, we might decide to ride down to Magnolia and session a while.  And what's in this video is a pretty typical session.

The funniest thing that ever happened at Magnolia when I was there happened between Mike Sarrail (the tall guy who does the little kickout over the bump) and myself.  He was shooting photos one day of another jump at Magnolia, where we'd ride down off the canal bank, hit a little berm, and then hit a jump.  Mike and I were giving each other a hard time, and he started throwing dirt clods at me to try and make me mess up.  At one point, he threw a small rock at me as I was coming out of the little berm.  The rock went right between my arms and hit me square in the nuts.  I did a kind of rolling dead sailor and piled into the the ground.  It was the most accurate rock Mike ever threw, and he was laughing his ass off as I lay on the ground in pain grabbing my balls.  Aaaaahh... the things we remember about our sessions after time passes. 

Then next session after Magnolia is us riding some banks somewhere in an industrial area, either in Orange or Garden Grove, I can't remember.  That was the only time I ever rode there.  In that section we see John Povah trying, and then making the long manual.  Keith Treanor is going for the footplants.  I think it's Alan Valek who does the tailwhip on the bank, which was a pretty new trick then. 

Unlike today's videos where everyone gets a section and they spend months trying to land their absolute best tricks, in The Ultimate Weekend, I just wanted to show real riding.  No one had really done that yet.  Most of the mainstream videos up until then had guys riding in uniforms and flatlanding with helmets on.  I wanted to show what our world of BMX freestyle, jumping, and street riding really looked like.  I just happened to be one of the first guys to do that.  A tidal wave of other videos followed in the early and mid 90's, taking riding to new places.