Rush to glory
A FEW INCHES WIDE, A FEW YARDS (OR MORE) LONG and elevated -- what better tool is there for displaying guts and achieving glory in a world where tidy measures of skill, like home runs and holes-in-one, just don’t apply?
Boarders everywhere have adopted it -- the common pedestrian handrail alongside stairs -- as a measuring stick of gnarliness. The steeper, longer and higher the rail is, the greater the odds it will make them an alternative sports hero.
Word is that around 1987, decades after sidewalk surfing had mutated into an activity that exploited the urban environment as a giant playground, Southern California skateboarding innovators Natas Kaupas and Mark Gonzales goaded each other into being the first to boardslide down a rail. A no-handed aerial maneuver called an ollie allowed the skaters to pop off the ground and land on obstacles.
Ollieing onto a rail was the obvious, frightening and bone-breaking challenge after skaters had invented countless tricks on street curbs, fountain ledges and park benches. Sliding down a high metal beam was intimidating.
Turns out that it was also fun.
Soon the length of the attempted rails grew, from three stair steps to more than 20. Skateboarding magazines and videos tracked the progression. Handrail fever flared up in cities, and property owners began chasing off skaters and welding knobs on handrails to render them unridable.
To avoid hassles and get more practice, some skaters began making their own rails, and other boarders borrowed the idea. Today, custom handrails create Daliesque scenery in places far beyond the grip of urban pedestrians.
Hard black rainbows arc out of the packed powder on ski resort terrain parks, though snowboarders also ride real handrails in resorts where conditions allow it. Warped rails for wakeboarders rise up to 15 feet out of waterways. Pro skateboarder Danny Way’s custom-built bar, in a private Riverside County skate camp called PointXCamp, sticks out of the largest vertical skateboarding ramp in the world.
Skaters can slide facing forward or backward. The best of them can ollie, kick-flip the board 360 degrees, then land on the trucks holding the wheels and grind, metal on metal, down the rail.
Snowboarders and wakeboarders can pop up on a rail more easily than skaters because their feet are connected to the board. But what happens when a boarder loses control? He’s racing along the beam with a fraction of a second to decide how to best absorb the inevitable fall. “You’re pretty much going down,” says Joel Mahaffey, a pro snowboarder from Reno. “You’re either leaning too far forward and you slide off your toes and you might catch your face on a stair. If you catch your backside edge, you’re pretty much flying backward.”
Skateboarding presents harsher consequences: “A handrail in between tangled legs is never a good thing,” says Jamie Thomas, a pro street skater from San Diego. Teeth smack pavement, skulls crack, urethras snap. Most street skaters inadvisably don’t wear helmets or pads, even after a few trips to the emergency room. A few manage to escape injury. “Some people are really loose, and they can fall on the rail and catch themselves,” Thomas says, “and it’s not that big of a deal.”
For boarders who learn to conquer their fear and ride away safely, rails are addictive. Some, including Mahaffey, set up generators so they can flood a handrail with light before dawn, avoiding security guards. Pro wakeboarder Cody Hall, from Canyon Lake, Calif., has been fined $500 for illegally building rails in lakes -- and even had a motorcyclist tow him into miniature pools he had constructed at either end of a handrail in a schoolyard. Thomas scratches the itch often.
“I’ve done quite a few one-rail missions,” he says, like the time he and his crew drove from San Diego to Phoenix, skated a preidentified rail for 45 minutes at 1 in the morning, got kicked out and made it back home for breakfast.
Ten-stair rails once made Thomas’ heart pump, but he now considers that distance just a warm-up. He and other glory seekers will continue to look for or build gnarlier rails to grind. In a lake or on the moon, the question is always the same: How do I get up the guts to go for it?
This report was compiled by the Outdoors staff and freelancers.