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!

Watching Alejandro skate the Greenwood Village Skatepark is always fun; afterall, we’ve been going there for almost 8 years now. We took our old Canon VH1 over to Mckinley a couple of weeks ago, but it took my dad a little time to encode the footage, edit it and place it on the web. He said it is actually easier to compress digital video using the Adobe Flash (flv) format and let Wordpress do the rest. I think he uses the Anarchy Media Player plugin. I guess we’ll start placing our videos on the blog in the future, but please let us know what you think about that.

Greenwood Skate Video

Anyway, enough of the techno-mumbo-jumbo. What do you think of the video and what about Alejandro’s skating? There are a couple of new tricks in the video. The kiwi slide is a lot of fun and he’s definately getting more grind time on the rails. Also, I noticed he landed a blunt, a 360 out and a judo kick.  I’d enjoy hearing from you, especially if you’re a corporate sponsor and you think there is a place on your team for us, but regardless…enjoy!

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!

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!