Since I don't have photos or video of our snow riding in Idaho BITD, why not go with the best snow riding video ever. Fabio Wibmer just kills it in this funny video from a couple of winters ago. This post goes out to Sven Soisdal in Norway, and Rick Coronado, both laid up with injuries right now. I told them I'd try to write more BMX posts this month, while they're recuperating.
As I've mentioned, many times over 12 years of BMX blogging, I got into BMX riding in a trailer park outside Boise, Idaho, in the summer of 1982 (Latitude 43 degrees, BTW). It was several miles outside of town, totally isolated, and surrounded by waist high sagebrush for miles. Officially, the trailer park didn't have a name, but we all called it Blue Valley, because every street name started with "Blue." You can look up "Blue Hill Lane, Boise Idaho" on Google Maps, and zoom out, to get an idea how isolated it was. Now there's a lot of businesses in the larger area, particularly the Micron Technologies complex, across the freeway. Micron was one small building then, just a computer chip start-up, all the other businesses within a couple miles didn't exist then.
So there was this little community, filled with, fine, upstanding Idaho White Trash, and not much to do. Even though Boise is pretty far north, the summers are hot, around 90 degrees (F) often. So the dozen or so teenage boys, and 4-5 girls, would stay inside all day, watching TV or whatever. In the evening, as the air cooled down, we'd all come out, and congregate by the basketball court and grassy area at the end of the big pond. Every night we'd try to find something interesting to do. This usually turned into a game of football, whiffle ball, shooting baskets, or riding our BMX bikes. There were no mobile homes on the outside edge of Blue Heaven Lane then, but there was a dirt area. Some dirtbike rider a couple years before roosted small berms on the ends of the dirt area, and built four small jumps. That was our "track." As the summer rolled on, we spent more and more time riding our bikes, and less time playing other sports.
We started pushing each other, breaking parks on our crappy bikes, and buying better parts with what little money we could scrounge up. Mowing lawns could make us a few bucks. Babysitting in the trailer park paid $1 an hour and all the government cheese we could eat. Seriously, that was the pay. I hate most cheeses, except on pizza. Somehow I used these, and working a couple nights a week at the local trap and skeet club, to buy Z-Rims, Hutch forks, and a gold anodized, Diamond Back stem. That made my Sentinal Exploder GX bike ridable. Yeah, that's what it was called. It wasn't even a Kmart Special bike, it came from a Kmart wannabe store, I think. I bought the bike, complete, for $5, from a friend in New Mexico.
In late September, one of the guys got word that there was actually a BMX track in Boise. Scott, Rocky, James, and I piled into Scott's mom's Ford Pinto (not a hatchback), with their three bikes, and we went to a race in mid-October. I ,as the other three guys raced, smoked most of the locals, and brought home trophies. The next weekend we piled the whole crew into my dad's big, silver, Ford van, and went to the race. We'd been pushing each other so hard, in our isolated world, that we were all pretty fast riders by then, though we'd never actually raced. We all wound up being highly competitive in our classes, and all 8 or 9 of us brought home trophies. That really pissed off all the local point chaser kids, getting smoked by a bunch of yahoos in Levi's, T-shirts, and with paper plates for number plates. Nobody could figure out where all these fast kids on POS bikes came from. The desert, that's where.
We drove back to Blue Valley completely stoked! We had a natural high going, BMX was now our thing, and we were going to continue to kick ass at it. But there was one problem, that race was the last race of the year. Within a couple weeks, snow started falling. Rain came, the jumps first got muddy, and then froze, and were soon covered by drifting snow. We were in Idaho, after all. Winter hit Boise, and tried to dampen our stoke for BMX. It's the bane of BMXers in northern states. WINTER hates BMX.
Scot and Rocky saw some TV show about ice racing motorcycles in Wisconsin or something. Those racers took their tires off, and actually put screws in their tires, from the inside out, to get traction. They told us all this idea, and then tried it themselves. But it took 2-3 hours to get 8 or 10 screws in your tire. So that idea faded.
In mid winter, I actually made jumps our of snow, like building a snowman. I made a big ball of snow, then packed and shaped it, over a couple of days. I carried cups of water from home, and poured them on the jump, which froze into ice. I rolled my knobby up and down the jump, and the knobby tracks froze, giving it some grip. After about 3 days, I had a single good jump, where we could roll in off the little hill created by the earthen damn of the pond, and crash into two feet of fresh snow. I actually had someone take a few photos of me doing kicked out cross-ups over the jump, in a snowstorm, when it was about 10 below zero outside. Those photos got lost over the years.
But the best day of winter riding, that winter of 1982-83 in Boise, was a bright sunny day. Our pond froze over, and by mid-January it was 6" to 8" thick. A couple of the guys took their bikes out on it, and were riding on the frozen pond, in 3" to 4" of snow. One little area was kind of windswept, with bare ice. So they would pedal on the snow, the put a foot out, kick the back end sideways, and do flat track style slides on the bare ice. A couple other guys saw them riding, and walked around and got the rest of us out there.
We grabbed some snow shovels, and cleared off another section, about 20 feet long, and 6-7 feet wide. We would pedal across the snow-covered ice, hit the bare spot, and the throw it into one foot out slide, then which was totally fun. Then we'd hit the lip of snow on the other side, which would kick the back wheel straight, and we'd ride away. We just kept doing that over and over and over, for a couple of hours. It was just a blast.
We didn't do a lot of snow riding that winter, but we didn't let Ol' Man Winter totally kill our BMX spirit. While it wasn't near as crazy as Fabio Wibmer's video above, us Idaho trailer park kids did find a way to have fun on our bikes over the cold, Idaho winter.
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