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AoS-Fest IV : Paradise in the Desert |
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Day 2: Friday December 8th - East Phoenix Tour |
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Tempe Skate Park |
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| Having seen Tempe briefly last night, the group was already drooling with anticipation. We pulled up to the Tempe park around 3:00 pm. School was out, so kids were already there with more showing up constantly. Luckily, the flow bowl was near empty. There was a small group of older skaters sessioning the flow bowl, and they seemed quite happy when we all showed up. "All right! Now we’re gonna have a good session" one of them said. I recognized two of the younger guys. I had skated Tempe with them several times before. One of them always skates old school set-ups and rips the flow bowl. The other has an awesome style…real laid back and effortless…and would end his runs with huge transfers from the bowl out onto the street course. Along with all the "guys" we had a female skater in the mix. She was having a great time cutting up with us "new blood".(haha) The Tempe flow bowl took a while for the guys to get use too. The bad part was that Tempe was more slippy than normal. Even the locals said it was very slippery that day. All the dust was coming from some where. That made the bowl a bit dangerous. One of our crews, Barry Gililland, took a very hard slam. He was coming out of a backside carve and slid around. He got twisted and slammed back on his head. Thankfully he had his helmet on which saved him a most definite trip to the hospital otherwise. However, his sunglasses somehow shattered and part of the frame cut the bridge of his nose and chin pretty good. Barry took a long sit down break after that. The next rider up did almost the same thing. At that point, a couple of folks passed on the bowl and just went to skate around the street section. Patrick, Jay and a local were taking turns down wall rides down the banked ledges on the short stairs. Then Patrick and Jay moved to the euro-gap for some tricks. There were a group of local kids that were killing the euro-gap with all kinds of tricks. My favorite was a pop-shuvit, shifty this one kid was doing. Finally, Patrick was the last one skating and kept attempting an ollie off the bank onto the picnic table top. He came close several times, but once too fatigued, he decided to give up and save himself for tomorrow’s skating. Around 4:30 pm, we told everyone good-bye and called it a day. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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