Stinktown Roadtrip
Posted by Landozine - 05/09/09 at 10:09:43 pm
This ramp doesn't even make sense. The only thing it was good for was doing a high five on top of.
For the past couple of days, Jorden Guth, Andrew Grant and I were engaged in a short BMX tour of Toronto. I always look forward to visiting stinktown; its constantly an adventure. From the crazy jibberish speaking hobos, to the amazing pizza places on every single street corner to the abundance of incredible riding spots, you can easily spend a weekend immersed in the constant engagement of awesomeness.
On the first day we rode Wallace Emmerson park, the place where they keep all the not-so-metro ramps during the summer. All of the ramps were in pretty terrible condition though; soggy decks, transitions that didn’t quite meet the ground, broken ramp ribs everywhere. Despite all this, we still had a pretty good time. Mike Heaton was there building ramps for next year’s not-so-metro, local kids were ripping it up, and a hobo came through talking crazytalk to himself. Textbook Toronto.
After riding Wallace Emmerson, we went to hit up some street with the original ‘Bear Jew’, Leland. Andrew had never ridden Toronto street, and seemed pretty impressed with the little bits we found. Right at the base of the CN tower (the bonercolumn) he used a little tranny bump to 180 over a big metal footing for some kind of construction project. He cooked at it through traffic and asian tourists taking pictures in front of the tower and nailed it first try. It was epic.
We took a journey out to the east end of T.O to check out a new skate plaza that was half finished. Construction materials were still strewn about everywhere, but there were easily 20 guys riding BMX. I heard something about filming for a local scene video and that was why everyone was there. The park is going to be pretty rad when it is done, we were more or less exhausted by this point but Jorden still managed to kill it. There is a little quarterpipe-ish structure that is about 2.5 feet wide and 5 feet tall and you need to hop into it… Jorden managed to go above ‘coping’ and throw some sick barspins.
The next day, we left the city to check out Jorden’s hometown of Brampton. The reason we decided to go there was that there are like half a dozen free outdoor public parks. We rode two wooden parks and one concrete, all of which were super neat and entirely original. The first one we rode was my favorite, lots of flowing hips and interesting ramp structures. The second was a concrete monstrosity, every quarterpipe was worse than the last and all the rails pointed you in completely intersecting lines. It was nearly impossible to do more than one trick in a run.
We didn’t get the chance to stop at Bellwood’s for a one pound burger though, which is always a highlight to a TO trip, but one of Jorden’s friends from Brampton hooked us up good at Wildwing where he works. Half price wings and a cute asian waitress who ‘bites’ according to K-mart (Jorden’s buddy) was what our after riding eating session consisted of. Once we finished that, we hit the last park of the day… another wooden gem located on the other side of Brampton. This one had some gnarly ramps and lines, and would probably be a lot of fun if we weren’t completely drained. We managed to snap a couple of photos there but by the end none of us could really do anything more than suck.
Big thanks to Dave Waddell and Leland Nightengale for putting us up while we were down. I think we all had a blast, and I’m optimistic about another trip down before the snow flies. Check below for the photo gallery.
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dam good photos. looks like it was an awsome trip.
Comment by Brandon — September 5, 2009 #
[...] woke up this morning, popped open my RSS reader, read this on Capital, and got really home sick. Click the photo above to check out an interesting photo essay [...]
Pingback by REPSET - CANADIAN BMX — September 6, 2009 #
Super good photos Gotta love the Jorden table, thought it was Gary Young for a second. Then I saw the holocaust body and realized it was BAMBI motherfucker!
Comment by Rich Red — September 6, 2009 #