Dark skies, zombie arms, stars and ditches
Head over heels in the Tunnel-Of-Love.
We plunged zombie-armed through the fabric of night—the homogeneous, untouchable, lightless velvet that cloaked the pines. We groped for a spot to pee, fingers extended, ready to touch God or be obliterated against blackjack trunks.
We felt our way back to bed with cautious steps until we jammed our digits into steel and slid them along the truck's body, feeling for the door.
A last look at the sky through the window revealed towering silhouettes, pine-shaped cut outs in the stars. So many stars. None of them ours.
The sun is a black pinhole.
Half that, actually.
Betelgeuse floats in the night sky. It’s Orion’s shoulder, and from where we’re standing the Sun looks 40,000 times larger. And compared to Sirius, the brightest star we can see, the Sun shines 10 billion times brighter. Both are illusions.
Betelgeuse is at least 700 times the size of the Sun, and Sirius is nearly twice as bright. And if the Sun eclipsed the biggest, brightest stars it would vanish in a solar system sized sea of blue LED light. Not even a low watt speck of amber incandescence would remain. Like the prick end of a sewing needle transiting a beach ball. And if that pin pricked the ball and let out a single red blood cell, that would be Earth. And that lost, pin prick, mote of orange would be a black hole that could swallow about a million Earths. That’s our star, and it was rising soon.
Meanwhile, 60 miles north, the Grand Canyon sprawled in the dark. A wonder of Earth, shelter, grave, ecosystem, a ditch carved by weather and time. But, it’s our ditch, over a mile deep and twice the height of any building we’ve ever built. And we weren’t going to miss the chance to watch the orange speck rise above it. We rolled out of the Coconino under twilight and headed north to catch the show properly from the South Rim.
After the solar rim ritual our pilgrimage took us to another ditch. Man made. An overlooked feat of civil engineering that quietly spares the city from snow melt and monsoon floods. A heroin den or wayward home for some. A bordello, prophet’s tablet or canvas for others. For us, the megalith beneath the street was a shrine to the carve, where we paid tribute in turns, offering sweat for joy until lunch.
Heather’s first feral full-pipe.
Head over heels in the Tunnel of Love.
(I originally published this on my gym’s blog on June 16th, 2023)
Coyotes in Colorado, the pictures
Mostly Frisco.
Everything half decent I shot on the two day rendezvous with FBM and the Maiden America crew in Colorado.
Read the full post here: Meet Me In The Hills
Coyotes in Colorado
It was the evening. My phone rang.
It was 2019, mid-September, the last steam bath days of St. Louis heat stretched on like slobber strands dangling from a hound’s jowls.
One night I was admiring the Moonish street lamp outside my window when the phone rang. It was Jackson. He pitched a rendezvous. In ten days meet FBM, Profile, and some of the extended ménage in Colorado to hitch along for a leg of the 6th Maiden America tour for roughly 48 hours of riding in the Rockies. It was short notice and a short trip—a blink.
Street Lamp, surrogate for the Moon.
I extended my right arm and my elbow creaked like a door in an abandoned Victorian, as it had for months. The tendonitis reduced gripping my bars to a symbolic gesture, but it wasn’t a deal breaker. I might get in a few airs before the rusty hinge pulled off the door like viscera velcro. And prospecting for transition gold in the mountains with friends was worth it even if I couldn’t ride. I decided to cut work and booked the flight to Denver.
Other than the brushes on Bohren’s Midnight Radio summer boiled off without a hiss, but Jackson’s call promised fall wouldn’t evaporate the same way. So, before dawn on the equinox I slipped on my backpack and tugged my bike bag 6 blocks to catch the 5am Red Line to Lambert.
A few hours later Jackson grabbed me from the Denver airport and we were off to meet the others west of the city. When we pulled into the motel parking lot the renegade BMX nobility we were joining were starting to gather around the vans. It was mostly familiars.
Jackson and I were close friends from when I lived in Santa Cruz. I watched Garrett grow up ripping Ramp Riders in Saint Louis with his brothers, Zach and Adam. Steve Crandall became a friend after years of crossing paths on the road. Others: Stew, Dolecki, Seamus, Holladay I knew from prior FBM meet-ups and the typical currents of BMX life. The Leeper Bros, Jay from QBP, Vic from Circuit, Matt from Profile, and the bizarrely skilled Declan Murray were new to me and—
”I’m so horny!”
Eric Holladay knew what he started and grinned behind black sunglasses as he strolled up to the van, un-buttoned short sleeve billowing, khaki shorts, slides, banana in hand.
”I’m horrnyyy,” replied a voice from the shadows of the van interior, Seamus I think.
”Man, I’m so horny. Is anybody else horny?” asked Garrett.
Pockets of voices around the asphalt returned,
“I’m horny,”
“Whooo’s horny?”
“Sooo horny.”
Then nothing.
This was a pack of coyotes.
The trip was two days, and that’s being generous, but it felt like a week in the best way.
On the first day, I did manage a few carves at The Hook and a few airs at the Milliken park on the qwedge. That earned me six more months of frayed cable friction in my arms. So, I was sidelined right away but happy and shot tons of photos.
Me at Milliken, by Jackson Allen
Garrett Guilliams at Frisco.
None of us had a clue leading up to it, but this trip marked the conclusion of FBM operating as a handmade in the USA BMX bike company. Steve made the announcement while everyone was taking a break at Frisco. But, he also made clear this wasn’t the end of the road for friendships or road trips.
FBM was always more people than product anyway.
The road—we met there, we meet there, and if we see each other again, that’s where it’ll be.
(Edit:July 18, 2026)
Check out Steve’s new ventures:
Radshare - A not-for-profit getting kids on bikes and in helmets.
Drop In Coffee - Coffee that supports the Radshare cause.
Steve’s Youtube - Where he’s sharing footage old and new.
Santa Cruz state of mind
Imagery from our Santa Cruz visit.
It’s been nearly a decade since the second time I moved away from Santa Cruz. Even more than the place, it’s the state of mind I return to that feels like home.
Joy Machines
The good’s waiting, it doesn't care how you get there.
J O Y M A C H I N E S
Various vessels to find the good out there.
“There is always so much good out there for us, waiting.” my friend Joe wrote in response to some travel photos I shared in our intermittent, but years long email thread. I agree, but I would, and he helped shape my opinion nearly two decades earlier.
In 2004, Terrible One, the BMX company he co-founded, put out their one DVD. It was unlike anything I’d seen in BMX.
The riding in the video was powerful, and nice to look at, but the context of the riding was the belle of the ball.
It was a world tour seeking out ruined ramps in vast, desolate landscapes, immaculate architecture calling for a carve among esoteric sculptures in ancient cities, improbable skateparks lacquered in vibrant graffiti embedded in equally vivid cultures that were in stark contrast to our own. The video was a beacon and the places they traveled became pilgrimage sites for generations of riders afterward, acting as corridors to an way of life that is greater than the sum of its parts.
It was obvious that the bike was just a vessel, ferrying them, all of us through our experience.
How rad we get, or how much fun we have along the way is up to us. If we make the experience entirely about the bike, or how we're riding it, we risk making our vessel into a cardboard boat, permeable, soggy with time, and easily sunk by the waves and rain rolling in with the inevitable storm of entropy.
26 years into my own riding, I still wake up with this electrostatic feeling in my skin, excitement, a hunger for a carve on the edge of traction, the cresting arc of a good air, wall rides, and the buzz of discovering new shapes to ride.
But, I know the bike is just a vessel, an avatar, and it could easily look like a skateboard, a pair of shoes, a guitar, a pen, a camera, anything, any activity. It can take any form because the power isn't in the vessel, it's in the understanding that the good is out there waiting, and it doesn’t care how you get there.
When you know that, the vessel appears in a form just for you.
Winter shipping
I’ll be shipping your orders once per week, on Thursday, through winter.
The post office will be harder to get to over the winter. I’ll ship orders on Thursdays, weather permitting.
Thank you—Nathan
Vert Night at Sk8 Liborious, in pictures
We tread on the bones of everything before us.
New temples and new gods root in the mortar and bones of old temples and old gods.
Sk8 Liborious reminds me of a text conversation I had with my friend Brandon about the palimpsest of our lives, and this passage he shared from Robert Harrison’s book, Dominion of the Dead.
“…Arrowheads everywhere in the soil. We are all latecomers. To be human means to come after those who came before. Just as we are always preceded by our forebears, so too the ground in which we lay them to rest has always already received the bones of others—‘others’ in the most radical sense of the term, including that of other species, many of whom have died on our behalf.”
—Robert Harrison, Dominion of the Dead
I took these pictures during one of many night sessions on the Sk8 Liborious vert ramp in 2019 while healing from tendonitis.
Update: Sk8 Liborious burned to the ground overnight on June 29th, 2023.
No one was injured.
We tread on the bones of everything before us.
Brandon, SF curb cut, by Jackson Allen
Local hang out.
Call cops
Meeting up with FBM at the Lucero Family Picnic.
The medium is the message.
Last weekend I rented a car and headed down to Memphis to meet up with Jackson and the rest of the inhabitants of FBM’s black school bus. They were wrapping up a trip across the south culminating in Lucero’s Family Picnic at Minglewood.
I shot a roll of film on the Olympus and another with my Holga.
Sharpie tats and Seamus airing a DIY vert wall with Betty Boop eyeing him up are my favorites.
Thanks to Crandall for having me and Brian Venable for letting us stay at his house.
sasquatch weather
It’s not explicitly a BMX company, we just all have our roots here.
Jackson has a quick interview on BMX UNION about his most recent Sasquatch Canyon video, Notes From the Field: Short Cuts.
“Kurt: How does Nathan Parker’s brand WEATHER come into play for this video?
Jackson: WEATHER is an apparel company that Nathan Parker conceived in 2011. We are interested in making durable, timeless things that will stand up to some abuse. It’s not explicitly a BMX company, we just all have our roots here. WEATHER is an effort to preserve and celebrate some of the same feelings we got when we first put a leg over a bike. A sense of wonder. While this isn’t a WEATHER project, almost every rider who is a part of that brand (officially and unofficially) has a small part in this video. In each of those parts there are some tiny inklings and hints of what a WEATHER project might look like.”
BMX Union- Behind Notes From the Field: Short Cuts
Fair Weather Gathering
Greg White’s helping me build some ramps in Ramp Riders’ back lot.
In 9 days the Fair Weather Gathering will be taking place at Ramp Riders skatepark here in St.Louis. When I began to make more headway with Weather I knew the first thing I wanted to do was to bring people together to celebrate bike riding under The Weather flag. I hope to see you there September 21, 2013.
