At 1:11 in this video, you see three skaters carving through the Sheep Hills Ditch in Costa Mesa, California. I think it's Marty "Jinx" Jiminez, Tom Groholski, and Mark Gonzales, but I'm not sure. Vision Psycho Skate came out in 1988, and I worked as a PA in their video company, Unreel Productions, at the time. I didn't have any input on the video, Brian Gillogly directed that one.
While not much different than hundreds of other ditches across the American West, this ditch just happened to be a few blocks from the cluster of buildings that housed Vision Skateboards and Vision Street Wear clothes, in the mid and late 1980's. It was not a place that got sessioned daily, but a lot of skating went down there over the years, and it appeared in Psycho Skates in 1998, and also in the intro of Vision's Barge at Will in 1989, at 1:59. You can see the brushy trees of the area that later became known as Sheep Hills (BMX jumping trails) in the background.
While not crazy skating trick-wise, these two clips, and the really cool longer segment of the Poway ditches at 2:59 in Barge at Will, got skaters everywhere looking for local ditches to carve at speed. There are all kinds of ways to have fun on a skateboard, and ditch skating drew in both the vert skaters that were the most respected genre of skating then, as well as the street skaters, which was a new and emerging aspect of skateboarding, at the time.
As a BMX freestyle guy working at a skateboard video company then, I made VHS copies of all the raw skateboard footage coming in from Vision video shoots. So I got to watch skate footage at work, before anyone else saw it, which is pretty cool. Even better, I found out where a lot of cool spots and some empty pools were from all the skaters. Someone in Vision, I can't remember who now, told me there was a mini-ramp hidden somewhere in the brushy trees and bushes "down 19th street" in Costa Mesa. So I started heading down there after work, wandering around, looking for this ramp. A lot of skaters still hated BMXers then, so the person didn't tell me the exact spot. That was probably mid 1998.
One of the first things I found down there was this long ditch, with the round elbow you see in the clips above. While not a great bike jump, the inside hip was fun to bunnyhop air after carving along the ditch, and I started hitting this ditch on my ride home from work now and then. I never did find the hidden mini-ramp, it was somewhere else, I guess. But I did some wandering around that area of empty, oil farm land. There were a couple small jumps down there, next to the creek some BMXer had made. Our cameraman, Pat Wallace, said someone found a 4 foot long alligator in the creek there once, but I could never find a news report to back that up.
In late 1990, a couple of local BMX guys, known as Hippy Jay and Hippy Sean then, found an open meadow in the middle of the trees, and began to build the jumps soon known as Sheep Hills. The area is now officially Talbert Regional Park, and much to everyone's surprise from the early days, the Sheep Hills jumps are now not only still there, but famous worldwide due to so many famous jumpers riding there in the 1990's. The S&M Bikes riders/P.O.W. House (Pros of Westminster) guys, led by Chris Moeller, Dave Clymer, John Paul Rogers, and several others, sessioned Sheep Hills regularly in the early 1990's. Those guys inspired the next generation, the Sheep Hills Locals crew of Sean Butler, "Barspinner" Ryan Brennan, Freddy Chulo, Josh Stricker, Marvin Loetterle, Jason and Adam Pope, and several more. In the years after, Cory Nastazio, Chris Duncan, Christophe Leveque, Stephen Murray, and many more honed their skills at Sheep.
I did not. as a freestyler who sucked at jumping doubles, after the days of the 3 berms, Sheep was beyond my skill level. So I wandered around doing really dumb street shit like BMX nollies, 6-7 foot half Cabs, and stuff. Like those tricks would ever be popular. Silly me.
By the time the X-Games came along in 1995, the SHL posse riders, who included Alan and Brian Foster by then, were some of the leading BMX dirt jumpers in the world. Sheep Hills became known in the BMX world as one of the spots where a whole slew of great jumpers rode daily. Once in a while a couple might hit the ditch for a little session, but it was mostly a skate spot hit randomly. Vision Skateboards moved its headquarters to Santa Ana in 1990, to the old OP building on Lyon Street, and this ditch has sat there, largely ignored ever since, I imagine.
These days, mountain bikers and parents with strollers wander the trails around the area, and BMXers and mountain bikers jump at Sheep Hills, and the ditch still sits there, draining water in the winter like it's supposed to, largely forgotten by everyone. Like every ditch, officially, you're not supposed to skate there. It's pretty rough concrete, so if you do go check it out, safety gear, especially knee pads, is a real good idea. There are a lot of flat trails around there for mountain biking as well, great beginner level or recreational riding.
My photo of one end of the Sheep Hills Ditch, you can see the elbow part that's in the skate videos at the very end. The Talbert Regional Park, is located off Balboa Street in Costa Mesa, at the bottom of the hill at the very west end of 19th Street. The Sheep Hills jumps are about 100 yards away. #steveemigphoto
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