Live from the Dirtbowl - some lame riding!

I have been digging so much that I haven't really had a chance to ride. The dirtbowl is dug, but the walls are still not packed down. I've brought out the hand-tamp and have some of the sides somewhat packed, but it's going to take a long time. Anyway, here's a frame grab from a little video that I took today.



Nothing says pathetic loner like a video shot completely from the perspective of a camera stuck on a tripod. So, that's just the way it is. I placed the tripod at a couple of different angles and tried to capture the action as best I could. There's a ton of bugs attacking the video camera, but oddly enough, they didn't attack me. The riding is still particularly lame, but hey, I'm working on it. Keep in mind that the walls of the bowl are still very soft and if you do a 'real' jump, your tires will dig in and you'll just go over the bars. Plus did I mention that I'm old?

The video is longish, running nearly 6 minutes. If you endure the full vid, you are a trooper.

Backyard Dirtpark from slamigo on Vimeo.

DIRTBOWL! DIRTBOWL! DIRTBOWL!

The dirtbowl lives! I just finished digging out the last portion today. Holy crap, that was a lot of digging. I don't know if I had unrealistic expectations or anything, but when I thought of this day, I had thought of something like the following occurring:

It was a vision of me blasting huge airs while fireworks went off. Music was blaring as the Snow Birds flew directly overhead in perfect formation while the neighbours cheered, my wife wept tears of pride and my kids went nuts. Somewhere, just outside the edge of the crowd, Chuck Norris would make eye contact with me long enough to nod his silent approval. Yeah. F-Yeah!!

Well, it was more like me being so freaking tired and sore that I could barely ride my bike. My hands are a mess of callused blisters. The sides of the bowl are still pretty soft, but I am getting it packed down. I managed to pop off the spine transfer thing into the pool. Here, my 7 year old captures a picture of me entering the pool.



Here's a pic of my 7 year old testing out the berm wall. You can't really go any higher on the berm yet because I haven't packed it down. I'm still kind of planning how that will take place. Maybe I will get a water filled lawn roller?



This is his first time riding anything like this. I can't possibly imagine how cool this would have been for me if I had one of these in my backyard when I was a kid. Hopefully, the kids stick with the sport and have a lot of fun. If not, they better enjoy skateboarding, because the halfpipe will be built next summer and that will cost some actual money. All that I spent on the dirtbowl was the price of a shovel. ($15.99 at Cdn Tire)



I was reading online about how some guys can get bummed out about all the 'other' aspects of BMX. The trendiness. The peer pressure. The respect or lack of it. For me, this backyard dirtbowl is the pinnacle of what BMX was supposed to be. When I was a kid, if we could find a spot to ride and some dirt, we would just use our imagination and play on our bikes. On more than one occasion, I'm quite certain I said something like, "wouldn't it be awesome if you could build a quarter pipe out of dirt?!" We even built 'lake jumps' into really gross cow ponds. That was awesome until one of us got a nasty ear infection. Yuck.

But I look at the dirtbowl in my backyard and I can't help but smile. For me, this is pure BMX. Go play.

Dirt bowl is steadily taking shape

The digging continues. It just freaking continues and continues.

Sometimes I feel a little like Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind. He started out making a replica of "Devil's Tower" with mashed potatoes and then eventually lost it and built a giant mountain in the living room. Hopefully, somebody in my family loves me enough to organize an intervention if I ever get to this point.



But, on a positive note, the digging obsession is paying dividends. The bowl is actually taking shape now. I think that it requires about 2-3 days of digging. But I'm pretty optimistic. Three weeks ago I figured it would take about a week.

Here are some pics of the progress.



Here is a picture of the little spine transfer/entrance into the bowl. I've tried it a few times and it's already fun.



Another pic of the spine jump.



The arrow shown here is pointing to the smaller side of the table jump. That is the spot that I was hitting up in the earlier pictures from 'Day One'.



And finally here is the view from the edge of my lawn before my yard goes into the 'dirt park'. Kind of looks like the Shire from Lord of the Rings. Maybe it is time for that intervention...

A crushed skull and plenty of broken bones in the dirt bowl

The dirt bowl work continues. It's hard because I have to fit in the digging around 'life', but it is really starting to come along nicely. I figure that I have about a week or so left. I think I can have it totally dug by the end of the weekend. Getting the dirt packed down enough will take a while longer and if it doesn't rain, I will get out the hose. Which reminds me, I broke the outdoor tap last winter icing the hockey rink. Which reminds me, I have to take down the rink boards and get rid of the tarp.

Anyway, here is a picture of the skull that I accidentally busted up while digging. I believe it to be a deer. The whole skeleton was down there. The kids got a big kick out of this because they were sincerely hoping to find some dinosaur bones. In this first picture, if you look really closely, you can see the outline of the deer's head that I traced in the dirt to show the kids how it went together.



Then here's a shot of the rest. I'm sure there's still more down there, but the bones were really brittle. I don't think I have a career in paleontology because I pretty much destroyed everything I touched even when I was trying to be careful.



The bowl is really progressing. It's pretty hard to get the depth from my crappy pictures. The camera flattens the perspective badly. The walls here are about five feet high. It will be plenty big enough to boost some little airs. The twin tabletops are just to the left in this picture and will be attached to the bowl. It will be possible to boost off the smaller table directly into the bowl. Once the dirt is packed enough that is. Try it now and you'll auger your front tire about a foot into the berm wall.



There is a roll-in entrance and there will also be this pretty sweet spine to get into the bowl. It doesn't look like much in the pic, but in person it's cool. I have day dream visions of busting 360s off this spine into the bowl. Hey, it could happen...



I also picked up the new bars. This is purely a vanity purchase. I think they look just swell and I'm told that those Edwin grips are preferred. Good stuff.
As you can see below, I bought some Odyssey Aaron Ross spacebars. I am told that my jumps will be much higher and way more stylish.



Here they are attached to the bike. Which reminds me. I suck at taking pictures with my crappy camera. I will have to get my brother to come by and take real photos of the bike, the bowl and me riding the bowl, with his DSLR.

Can you dig it?

Can you dig it?

Yeah, I can dig it.

I dig a lot. Maybe too much. Last year, I bunged up my wrist by digging too much. I thought NSAIDs (non steroid anti-inflammatory drugs) could fix everything. They can't.

But it also is therapeutic to dig. It's part of creating. For me, it's part of the ride. But this year, I've actually admitted that I can't build a real BMX track and build it right. A BMX track is for racing and the jumps are all curved tops. Also, it just doesn't work right unless you bring in truckloads and truckloads of dirt. It would never be wide enough to race on and most importantly, it wouldn't be fun enough because the jumps would be lame.

But my kids are also too young for me to simply start building up a 4-pack or 6-pack. What to do?

My son was giving me grief over the design of the pump track. He complained that he couldn't build up enough speed to get up the jump properly or ride the big berm with any flow. He asked me if I could remove two smaller jumps that were slowing him down and build another berm.

I offered him one better:

"How about we make one giant berm and have it go all the way around?"

"Huh?"

"Let's make a dirt bowl!"

"Oh sweet! It will be a dirt skatepark!"

So today began the digging out of the inner section of the berm. I expect that it is going to take about a week to complete. The walls will be about 4' high to begin and I'll concave out the centre of the bowl a couple feet. Actually, I plan to go as far down into the ground as possible until I hit rock. There is a ditch nearby, so if drainage is an issue, I am prepared to dig out a trench and lay down an actual drain pipe. But it's pretty dry at that spot, so I probably won't even have to do that.

Pushing this much dirt by hand is not easy. For some really weird reason, I just don't mind doing it.

I am still going to order a couple truckloads of dirt for the second section of the dirt park, but I should be able to get this area done with just the dirt from the spot.

It looked like this.



Then I started to hollow it out.



Other side. The left berm that attaches to the little jump with the 'coping' will connect to where I am standing in this photo and everything you see in the middle will be gone. The little jump in the centre of this pic is the one that my son was complaining about. Bascially, everything in the middle where the shovels are will be gone and the dirt moved to the walls to build the berm up. Then the 'bowl' will be dug down and made concave.



Here I am beginning to line the dirt up for where the berm-wall will be.



Always listen to the riders when building. My son had lots of great ideas about how the dirtpark could be built to suit what he wants to do. I'm building it for the kids. Hopefully, they will be building and riding this dirt park for years.



Edit: Here is a poorly photoshopped artist's rendition of what the bowl should sort of eventually look like.

Day One

So I just made it through Day One. I'm a little bummed. The bike is not at all what I expected. I got on the BMX and it felt totally foreign. I could barely ride the thing. That was not expected. I thought it would feel like going home. Instead, it felt awful.

At first.

I tried some bunny hops on the flat pavement. Ouch. Apparently, at some point over the past 20 years that I was away from BMX, some freakin genius decided that everyone should be running 120 PSI in their tires. I could feel the landings in my ears. It was beyond jarring. I am used to a mountain bike with 8" of travel at each end and 35 PSI in the tires. This was absolutely bone rattling. But, I kept at it and tried to figure out how not to get hurt while attempting tiny bunny hops.

I decided to move on to the dirt track. The dirt should be a lot softer than pavement right? As it turns out, not much really. It was a little bit softer, but you still get rattled around when you land.

The bike I bought is really, really whippy. It has 13.22" chain stays. That means that it likes to spin and it likes to loop out. I hit up the smaller of the table tops at slow speed and tried to bunny hop at the lip. Before I knew it, I was standing superman style with the bike suspended up in the air in my outstretched arms. Then I tried to not loop the bike away from me and totally nose-dived. I was starting to get really depressed. I just spent a lot of money on a bike that I could not even ride. Argh. Why do I ride a kid's bike?

So, with my kids racing around and egging me on, I tried to bunny hop again and managed to get the bike level in the air.



I did this a few more times and it very, very slowly started to feel somewhat like something that I might be able to do. Again, roll into the little table with not much speed and pop up.



Okay, it's not going to impress anyone. Well, it sort of impressed my two youngest kids. My oldest gave me some polite encouragement. I think he felt a little bit sorry for me. Maybe even for himself. "C'mon Dad! That one wasn't too bad!"

So, I kept at it on and off for most of the afternoon and actually managed to get some little table-tops. I swear that one was fully flat but not filmed. I know, without footage it's fiction, but I swear it was clicked.

Keep in mind that I'm not carrying much speed and the height that I'm getting is just from the pop/bunny hop that I'm pulling. Still, it's kind of fun.

Here's a neat little one.



Not totally flat, but not totally crap. I guess it's okay for Day One. I really have to work on my facial expressions though.



I decided to get all old-school and go for a cross-up. I got the click, but not much height. Still, I would like to point out to the jury that the bars are fully crossed. Note the brand new Capital BMX shirt. Maybe it has good karma?



The last jump of the day was not pretty. I did another table top attempt at a higher rate of speed and actually got a bit more air. The picture sucks because my brother tried to do some sort of light/angle experiment that didn't work and it was taken a little early before I got the bike flat.



But because I went a bit higher, the bike dug into the dirt when I landed. It's still only April. The ground is still drying out. I pitched over the bars and as I rolled commando style down the tranny, the bike landed right on top of me. I caught it on the second bounce and stood up. That would be enough fun for Day One.



Here's the bike after one full day of backyard action. It's all nice and dusty and happy. Bikes like dirt.