It seems like every year we try to capture the skateboard skills we’ve learned over the year into a single annual skate video. This year we thought it would be fun to show two videos created nearly 3 years apart. The first video shows Alejandro skating in late December 2006 at the Greenwood Village Skate Park.

For this year’s annual 2009 video we decided to mix it up a bit and have some skateboard video footage from Greenwood Village, Redstone in Highlands Ranch and Castle Rock, Colorado. Enjoy and please let us know what you think. Happy New Year!

The City of Brighton celebrated the grand opening of its new concrete skate park on 10/18/2008 with give-aways, demos, a ribbon cutting, a DJ and more. Check out the festivities and a little skating to boot on the video below. 

We got to the park early to get some skating in before the city’s official presentation. We thought there might be a skate competition and wanted to get a feel for the park beforehand. The street course is particularly interesting and has a little of something for everyone.

This is a well-designed park and worth the trip from the Denver area. The skaters take skating seriously so you’ll need to bring your A game if you intend to play SKATE. The address for the park Brighton Skate Park is 1101 Judicial Center Drive, Brighton 80601.

Recently, we implemented a new “look and feel” for the SK8NE1 web site. No, we didn’t do a lot of research and no, it isn’t a drastic improvement. It is, easier to use and it does, allow us to manage the content more efficiently. Also, we updated our pictures; afterall, we aren’t little kids anymore!

SK8NE1 web site "look and feel" as implemented on 10/01/08

Here’s what we did: We created three specific content areas. 1.) Our skateboard blog is used to chronologically document our activies and give our friends the opportunity to participate in the discussions. 2.) From now on we’ll be using our new YouTube channel to deliver videos. 3.) We decided to periodically archive all the old image and video files to a media repository to keep things fresh and up-to-date. Finally, we added a feedback link to give you the ability to eMail us your thoughts.

In an earlier posting, I discussed how YouTube could be used to do the “heavy lifting” for the bandwidth associated to online skateboard videos. I started with a short clip from the Denver skatepark recorded quite some time ago. Well here’s an example of a video we produced last year during the holidays at the Greenwood Village skate park:

Interestingly, we removed the in-home “fair use” soundtrack from the original video for the potential copyright infringement implications of placing the video on YouTube. Now here’s what is really cool. Google and YouTube have authorized the distribution of music tracks from a variety of bands looking for visibility, so you can now replace your existing audio track with something that can be legally used with your video on the web.

On Sunday September 7th, we travelled to several different skateparks in the Denver metropolitan area. We call these skateboard adventures “Great Alsup Skateboard Tours”. We typically get up early, have a hearty breakfast, jump in the car and hit a variety of skateparks. On this outing, we went to downtown Denver, Castle Rock and Redstone (Highlands Ranch).

We arrived at the downtown Denver skatepark somewhere between 8:30AM and 9:00AM. BTW: This is the best time to skate this park since it can get really crowded later in the day on weekends. One popular part of this park is the wave at the southeast corner. There are 4 or 5 humps of increasing size that allows you to build momentum for jumping obstacles. I landed 3 cones several times before we decided to go to Castle Rock for some street activity.

It’s a long drive from downtown Denver to Castle Rock, but it goes quickly because we talk about tricks and technique in the car. The Castle Rock skatepark has some good terrain to practice street tricks, like rails and stairs, without a lot of risk. I landed a back-side 180 and a pop-shove-it over the stairs and to finish the day off I finally did a boardslide on the inclined rail.

We came, we skated, we left…It was a good day!

I wanted to see if I could place a YouTube video in a WordPress blog posting so I could reduce any additional bandwidth costs of serving up large video files. I started by creating a YouTube channel called, you guessed it, SK8NE1. Then, I exported an old (i was about eight) short (15 seconds) video clip to DV format (60MB) and uploaded it using the Google Gears upload application. Here’s the result:

Note: We changed our WordPress settings to full text to see if the YouTube video above would show up in Google Reader after the ping indices were updated.

I think it looks pretty good so I may start using YouTube to do the “heavy lifting” of my skate videos. Over the next year or so I’d like to put up some short training videos on skate tricks I’ve learned over the years. Digital video files can be enormous and if I get a lot of people looking at my videos it could cost me (my dad) some bucks! Enjoy the short clip, I’ll plan to put more up soon. Please let me know what you think!

Every year we go back to see our grandparents in Parkersburg, West Virginia. There are not very many skateparks in the area, but it is fun to go exploring down the Ohio river and our grandmother always has a lot of Summer things for us to do. This year we took an airplane so we didn’t stop at any skateparks on the way from Colorado. Nonetheless, when we got to the area we started looking around for skate parks.

The first skate park we went to was in Marietta, Ohio since it was the closest park to our grandparents home. There really wasn’t much there: 5 foot half pipe, 1 foot spine, small ledge and a quarter bowl. There’s a pretty strong group of skaters in Marietta, but my guess is the adults and city governments in southeast Ohio just don’t get the idea that skateboarding is a lot more than a past time for kids with nothing else to do.

On the weekend, we headed up to Athens Ohio where we found a nice concrete park. We wondered how old the park was because the surface was pretty beat up, then some sk8rs told us it was built only a few years ago. I’m not sure if it’s the humidity or what, but the surface at this park seems to have aged a lot in just 2 years. When we arrived in Athens it was 10:00AM and the sk8rs were already leaving because of the heat, so I guess you either skate really early in the morning or later at night since it looked like there was some nice lighting. In any event, there was a lot of good terrain and we skated it for nearly an hour.

Finally, in Athens some sk8rs told us about a park about 30 miles away called Skatopia. It sounded really interesting so we packed up the car and headed to Rutland, Ohio. Now, this park is hard to find, but well worth the effort. There was a skateboard museum with 100s of skateboards from past decades. There was a barn retrofitted for skating with massive 16 foot dropins! At the top of the property was a concrete park with a real school bus built into one of the bowls. We’d never seen anything like it. The park quickly became one of our top skate adventures of all time. Thanks Brewce, you rock! I hope you stay young forever!

Over the years, I’ve picked up the names of different skate tricks from the people at the various skate parks, but I’m not always entirely sure how to spell them or if the trick names used amongst skateboarders are consistent. My observation is that most people do use similar names, but there appears to be local slang and different vernacular used from park to park. So here’s a picture of my latest Faky Air 180, or is it Fakie Air 180?

Just in case you are wondering….I landed it!

This is the 2nd year we have made the trip up to Longmont to participate in the Rumble at the Ranch skateboard competition. The event started in the afternoon on of 6/21. It’s part of the 2008 Mountain Madness Series which is suppose to bring you the best in Colorado grassroots skateboard competitions. We always have fun meeting all our skateboard friends at these sort of things, but we should probably just do that once a year rather than meet for a “so-called” competition.

Here’s the problem, and it’s an issue with most of the mountain madness series competitions. Rarely, are the judges unbaised on their scoring. Most of the time, they are from the community where the competition is being held and are friends with the local skaters. You can see them high-fiving each other when the locals hit their sketchie tricks and ignoring the unknown kid’s skate routines.

I don’t want to come off as a “sore loser” because I actually won 3rd place in intermediate bowl. I just think this shows how far we need to go here in Colorado. It’s too bad there isn’t an organization that can qualify judges and make sure that they are being objective for all the participants. To me, it seems like this would be a good role for skatecolorado.org to take on since they appear to be sponsoring the competitions. Does anyone know of a national association that is talking about this topic? I’d enjoy hearing from you. Until next time: SK8NE1?

The bad news: My dad hurt his leg playing tennis.
The good news: We are SKATING a lot!

Check this hand plant out:

We’ve been working on the fakie air 180. Last year Nate was getting some great air on his, but we have not seen him around Greenwood much this year. So what’s the scoop?

Finally, the boneless, check out my thumbs up!