6.18 West Linn, exurbs of Portland. This is another one of those places where I go to visit and it may be fairly ordinary as far a vacation or travel destinations go, but it's skateboard heaven. Just outside my friend's door is this nice one way street and cul de sac, a really nice setup for a short hill carve. It reminded me a bit of the hill outside of the Akron bus station, set up with a steep and wide start, a straight run with a nice fast runout at the bottom. The one in Akron was really long, but it had more traffic, including buses.
I shot a few picks walking up then a clip going down. There were a couple of features on the hill that I used to shape the ride and you can see them if you pay attention. At the top I made a traverse, a quick kick turn, another traverse or slow switch back which I ran all the way left into a driveway. That's something I'll do if I can, use a driveway or even some grass to the side to bank off and lose some speed. You can see I turned so far into the carve that you can see straight up the hill from my front hand (holding the camera) leading the turn. There were some girls on their porch, I hope I didn't impose. It was their neighbor's driveway. I ran the turn way up the driveway, kickturned backside (toeside), and dropped down the hill a ways. I made a mistake here going down the fall line with no uphill preturn. Because of that, the speed got a bit much, so I put a foot down and banged off some speed. I say banged off because I didn't really foot brake or scrape off the speed, I stepped down hard a couple of times. You can hear it as some clicking behind the wheel noise. That foot stomping took the speed down faster than scraping. I thought about doing the run over and skating it perfectly but I thought the mistake was kind of cool, that's more of the reality of spontaneously skating a hill with the camera on rather than practicing it and then shooting. After that brake were several linked turns. They seem to draw out more to the frontside (left). The left turns sound different too. Finally there's a runout to the cul de sac.
Later I skated the parking lot at Albertson's. There was a high green hill behind it and a beautiful blue and white patterned sky. The lot had several good slopes, excellent black asphalt, and some sloping curbs, one of which I mounted on a little transition and ran along several times, not quite grinding. This lot's curb was a red painted specimen of curbus slopeida bankus. It reminded me of the yellow painted curbs that were all over the lot at the truck stop in Nashville, if you refer to the late March tour journal entries.
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