Looks like they are building a new skatepark down in Central Texas that will actually have a section composed mostly of large banked walls — perhaps kind of flat banks — my preferred terrain. It looks like a skatepark version of a drainage ditch. I’m very hopeful that it will be a great place to ride.

In 1979, Skateboarder Magazine put out this article, Freestyle In Transition, which dealt with the application of freestyle moves to banked walls. The article apparently struck home with me, because I think it affected my skateboarding forever. I’ve always been able to ride pretty much any kind of terrain, but banks are really my favorite. On banks you can really blend together styles from other skating areas – vert, flatland freestyle, longboarding, and of course, moves that were originally created on banks. It’s fun.

This is an slightly older video that Mike Vallely put up a while back for his Mondays with Mike series. He’s riding a reissue of his original Powell-Peralta pro model, complete with Rat Bones wheels. I think he flows really nicely on the old setup, and this is some nice bank skating. Really cool.

I am very happy about this picture my friend Mike took of me this weekend, so at the risk be being too self-indulgent on my blog, I’m going to post it here.

For my non-skating friends, this is a G-Turn, which is a carving turn done while doing a wheelie on the front wheels. Usually at the end the skater swings the board all the way around and comes down the wall backwards, but in this case I just carved a nice, wide turn. It really isn’t a very hard trick, but it is fun, and is also photogenic, so what the hell…here it is. I learned these when I was 14, and I’ve been doing them ever since.