One time Sheep Hills Local, Cory Nastazio, jumping at Sheep in a late 1990's JNCO commercial. This is the later part of the classic Sheep Hills era, when most of the best dirt jumpers in the world rode at Sheep Hills, and the X-Games was just beginning to show BMX dirt jumping to the rest of the world on mainstream TV, making these trails famous around the world.
I first wandered into the area now known as Sheep Hills in early 1988. I was looking for a mini-ramp some skateboarders at Vision told me about. Starting in December 1987, I worked at Unreel Productions, the video company owned by Vision Skateboards/Vision Street Wear. Skateboarding, BMX, and BMX freestyle were peaking at that time, and the money was rolling into the Vision empire by the bucketful. Unreel was located on a little office park street called Brioso, right on the edge of the mesa, the bluff in Costa Mesa, above present day Sheep Hills, and a few hundred yards towards the ocean. My main job at Unreel consisted of sitting in a tiny room with a whole bunch of different video machines, and making copies of tapes for people throughout the Vision world. Unreel had a $500,000, component Betacam edit bay, two $50,000 pro caliber Sony Betacam video cameras, and 11 employees, then. It was started, and run by Don Hoffman, longtime surfer and skateboarder, and the son of the owners of Pipeline Skatepark. The Vision empire then included Vision, Sims, and Schmitt Stix skateboards, Sims Snowboards, and Vision Street Wear clothing. The company was growing like crazy, and had something like 800 total employees then, and made about $50 million in 1988, I believe. Those were the gravy days.
Unreel Productions made full length videos to sell through Vision's 3,000 skate shop network, we made commercials to put in the Vision videos, and we made videos for trade shows and other events to promote Vision's companies. We even produced the first nationally syndicated action sports TV show series, called "Sports On the Edge." Between all of those, different people would call me up, or walk in my room, and say, "I need 10 copies of this by tomorrow," or "I need a copy of that segment to send to a TV show," stuff like that. So I sat there day after day, making small numbers of videos for people throughout the Vision businesses. I also ran errands, did odd jobs around the office, and basically was an assistant to everyone. I didn't produce or direct anything, there were a bunch of older surfer guys who did that. The pay was better than I got at the AFA the year before, and I got to know all the Vision skaters and Sims snowboarders, from Mark Gonzales and Gator, to guys like Shaun Palmer and Tom Sims himself.
I also made a window dub of every tape shot by Pat Wallace, our staff cameraman, and he traveled to all the AFA contests, the 2-hip contests, and the NSA skate contests. So I saw all the raw footage, and hand labeled all those tapes. In one of those tapes, Pat went out to some mini-ramp, hidden in trees somewhere, with some Vision skaters, and I later asked some of them where that ramp was. They told me it was hidden in the bushes, in the sketchy oil fields area, at the bottom of 19th Street, in Costa Mesa. That was only a few blocks away from our office. Since I rode my bike to work 3 or 4 days a week, I rode down there not long after, to the area where Sheep Hills was later built, looking for that mini-ramp. I never did find it.
What I did find was this dry ditch, which later showed up in the 1988 Psycho Skate video (in the intro, at 1:12), and the 1989 Barge At Will video(2:02, where Marty "Jinx" Jimenez tells the police helicopter, "Fuck You" at 2:02).
It wasn't a great place to ride on a bike, but it was fun to carve along. I soon began to head down 19th street after work, rather than heading towards Pacific Coast Highway, when I rode my bike home. I'd ride the ditch a bit, and then take about 3 hours or so to hit a series of little street spots all the way across Huntington Beach, to my apartment on the north side of H.B.. So, a couple years before the first jumps were built in what is now Sheep Hills, I rode through the trails that you take to get to Sheep, 2 to 4 times a week.
At that time, the big condo complex, on the hill above Sheep Hills, didn't exist yet, that was more open land then, with some hiking, dog walking, and riding trails through it. There were some jumps up in that area, and no one seemed to know who built them. There was a ditch jump, the kind you ride down into, and flyout on the other side. Freestylers like me, who couldn't jump doubles worth a damn, loved flyout jumps back then. There was also a big (for that time) hip jump on one trail, maybe 4 feet high, and 7 or 8 feet long. I learned about those jumps from none other than "Hollywood" Mike Miranda. Yeah, this guy.
Mike was a top pro racer in the early 1980's, and a really good jumper for that era. He was also show off, and shameless self-promoter, and so he wound up test riding bikes for the BMX magazines, and getting a lot of coverage outside of racing itself. That's the "Hollywood" aspect of Mike Miranda. By 1988, he was working as the Vision BMX team manager, taking care of the BMX racers and freestylers sponsored by Vision Street Wear clothes. Mike called me up one day at Unreel, to organize a video shoot for Vision clothes, with racer/jumper Rich Bartlett. Being the only BMX guy on the Unreel staff, I somehow got to tag along on the shoot, I think to carry the tripod or something. I'm pretty sure that was in early spring of 1988. We went to the hip jump, and Mike had his bike, and Rich had his bike, so they started hitting the jump. Pat the cameraman, got the video camera ready, and someone was there shooting still photos as well. I was stoked to find out that there were a couple of cool jumps just blocks away from work. Mike hit the hip jump a few times, just for fun, and then Rich hit it a bunch of times for the actual photo/video shoot. I think the stills wound up in a Vision Street Wear ad in the BMX magazines, and the video, like most of the video that we shot at Unreel, never got used for anything. There's a HUGE amount of high quality BMX/freestyle video form the late 1980's, that no one but me has ever seen, sitting in boxes somewhere, in a Vision warehouse. It'd be cool to dig into the footage now.
After that, my ride home from work would start with the ditch jump and the hip jump, on the hill above the oil fields, and then I'd head down, and maybe session the ditch a little, then ride out to Victoria/Hamilton to Brookhurst street, over the Santa Ana river ditch, and on through Huntington Beach. I know Mike Miranda hit that hip jump now and then, but I never ran into him on my rides home. I did run into freestyler Josh White one day, in 1989, while riding the flyout jump. I'd been trying bunnyop tailwhips then, and could never land them, and also trying tailwhips off little jumps, but couldn't land those either. At the time, no one had done a tailwhip off a jump. Joe Johnson did them on vert, and learned double tailwhips that year, landing his first at the same contest where Mat Hoffman landed his first 900. Josh White, the day I ran into him, said he'd been thinking about trying tailwhips on dirt, so we both started trying them on the flyout jump. It was the perfect place to learn weird new tricks. It was a 6 or 7 foot roll down into the ditch, then a 6 or 7 foot flyout, and you'd hover for a second, but only about 2 feet above the ground, when flying out. Neither Josh nor me could land one that day, though we were both beginning to get the back end of the bike all the way around. Josh landed his first tailwhip off a jump a year later, which I wrote a big blog post about a while back.
That was the only other BMX rider I ever ran into while riding those jumps. As I rode through the wide area by the creek, night after night, I kept noticing this little trail, barely more than a rabbit trail, on the other side of the creek. There was also a trail along the opposite side of the creek, with a little tiny tabletop jump on it, and I'd hit that once in a while. Finally, one night, I decided to follow that little rabbit trail, to see where it went. So I walked my bike along it, hoping there were no rattlesnakes hiding in the weeds by the trail. I went through maybe 100 yards of brush and little trees, and then it opened up into a meadow, an big open area. I thought, "Oh my God, this would be a great place to build some jumps." That place was where Sheep Hills is now, and the little rabbit trail was where the main wide trail into Sheep is now. But it was just an area of weeds then. Back then, in 1988-1989, BMX jumps got plowed most every where we built them, unless it was a real out of the way place. Land in Southern California was expensive, and is way more expensive now, and no one wanted kids getting hurt on their land, and then having parents sue them. So the key to building jumps was to find a hidden little place no one cared about.
I actually bought a shovel at the swap meet that weekend, and planned to go back to that open area and start building jumps. But I lived over on the other side of Huntington Beach, off of Warner, and I ended up building a flyout jump, and building up some tiny doubles that were already there, in the Bolsa Chica wetlands area, maybe 150 yards from where The Wetlands trails are today. So I forgot about the Sheep Hills area. In early 1990, Unreel got shut down, as the Vision empire imploded due to growing too fast, and the collapse of the skateboard and BMX industries. I got moved to the main office in Santa Ana, and never went back to that area in Costa Mesa for along time.
I made The Ultimate Weekend video in 1990, the 8th BMX video I produced, and the first one I totally self-produced. I shot video at the Oceanview jump, and Edison (High School) jumps, and the P.O.W. House backyard in 1990. But no riders ever mentioned a place called Sheep Hills. If you ask the original Sheep Hills jump builders, then known as Hippy Jay and Hippy Sean, they say they started work on Sheep Hills in 1990. But I never heard of it while making my video, which came out in October of that year. So they must have started building in the late Fall.
Back then, the Sheep hills area would flood during Southern California's winter rainy season, and just be totally muddy, from December into March. Sometime in 1991, late spring or early summer, I think, I went with some riders, probably Keith Treanor and John Povah, to this new place called Sheep Hills. There were three berms in the main line, and I think the first version of the bowl jump was built, and it wasn't very big, because I could jump it. Since it was out of sight of almost everyone, and since no one could park right by the jumps to draw attention to them, and we all had to ride in, the place went unnoticed.
Sheep Hills got built up in 1991-1992-1993, into about the size it is now, but with smaller jumps and lines. It wasn't until the Sheep locals actually drained the entire nearby pond to water the jumps, that police and official type people took notice. Somehow, being so out of the way, Sheep Hills has survived for 30 years, and became known around the world. It's not part of an official park, and it shows up on Google Maps. The legendary status of Sheep came since so many of the 1990's top dirt came out of the Sheep Hills scene. In the early days, the best known riders were the P.O.W. House/S&M Bikes crew guys, like Chris Moeller, Dave Clymer, John Paul Rogers, Alan Foster, Todd Lyons, Lawan Cunningham, and later Brian Foster, and several others. The next generation that came up, to which Sheep was their first main trails spot, were Shaun Butler, "Barspinner" Ryan Brennan, Josh Stricker, Freddie Chulo, Marvin Lotterle, Jason "Timmy" Ball, Neal Wood, Adam & Jason Pope, and that crew. European racer Christophe Leveque was a longtime local as well. Later on, in the late 90's, came Cory "Nasty" Nastazio, Chris Duncan, and Stephen Murray, as the top names local at Sheep. There was always a whole crew of good local riders as well, most of whom never became top pros.
One last little story about Sheep Hills. One day at Unreel, sometime in 1988,we got talking about that area. Pat Wallace, the Unreel cameraman said, "You know they found a 4 foot long alligator down in that creek a few years ago, right?" I didn't. Pat was known for telling tall tales... sometimes. But he also had a lot of random, weird facts in his head. I tried to find proof of the alligator story, but in those pre-internet days, I couldn't find an old news article anywhere. So maybe that's true, and maybe it's not.
That leaves only one mystery, where the hell did the name Sheep Hills come from, anyhow? I actually asked original builder, Hippy Jay, a few months ago. He said that when they first started building the trails, he called them "Hollywood," after Mike Miranda, who used to jump the hip jump I mentioned earlier, and other jumps nearby. Then one day, some local kids showed up to ride, and they were calling the place Sheep Hills. Jay had no idea where the name came from. There are no sheep. Hell, there are no hills right where the jumps are. But the name "Sheep Hills" somehow popped up among the local, Costa Mesa, kids, and the name stuck. A hundred years earlier, there were shepherds who raised sheep and goats on the mesa, and the area is known as Sheep Hill or Goat Hill to some really old locals. That's there the name Goat Hill Tavern, a Costa Mesa bar (140+ beers on tap) came from. So that's my personal story on what I know about Sheep Hills, before it became known as Sheep Hills. Here's one last video, rapped by pro skater, Pro Riders founder, and old friend of mine from a Vision skateboard tour we went on, Chris Gentry.
I'm not sure what the "ten years" in this video was. This video's from the Boozer Jam in 2014, 24 years into the life of Sheep Hills. What every, it's a cool video.
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