Mired in the dirt

It’s midmorning on a Saturday and seven mountainboarders are trying to prove why their sport deserves respect with such passion that the few who dream of its breakout potential, if they were here, would rub together their hands in glee.

They’re padding up, their stuff strewn around a man-made molehill on a couple of undeveloped acres in suburban Carlsbad. Elbow pads ringed with sweat salts. A tire-pressure gauge. A pair of padded ice-hockey shorts. Three rusty shovels and a rake.

Rob Eakle surveys the series of dirt jumps rising from a trail that swerves in and out of trees. Head, elbows, knees are covered.

He hooks his feet into bindings, wiggles them to make sure they’re secure and bombs down the hill, blasting four feet off the dirt hump. He clears the landing of the second jump going so fast that he kicks his board into a power slide. A contrail of red dust shrouds the knobby tires as he skids sideways into a peeling eucalyptus. Thump.

Eakle grabs the trunk in time to avoid body-checking the tree. He laughs, and hoots and cheers erupt from his fellow So-Cal Dirt Riders, an odd assortment age-wise, 14 to 47, who on this day range from the advanced Eakle to Jennie Stenhouse, a relative beginner. A bit cautious since a recent wrist-snapping slam off a jump, she points her board down a jump-less trail, cruising in a crouch, pink helmet bobbing, arms waving for balance. Whoa.

Like Jennie, mountainboarding is making unsteady progress on the thrill-packed action sports track that was paved by skateboarding and has widened in the last decade for snowboarding, wakeboarding and even kiteboarding. Hobbled by a shaky identity and weak infrastructure, the sport hasn’t had the juice to parlay a demo slot into a recurring berth at a mainstream launchpad like ESPN’s X Games. In 10-plus years, it has mustered about only 65,000 participants worldwide, according to Brian Bishop, editor of the dormant Mountainboarding magazine.

What hurts the most, mountainboarders say, is the sport’s sensationalized kill-yourself reputation: Always wanted Frisbee-size scabs? Grab a mountainboard! True, a Tylenol TV ad zooms in on a tumbling mountainboarder sweeping a steep slope with his body. And another for the Honda CR-V spotlights a lone mountainboarder bungling a cliff jump, the slam assuring him a bed in the ICU. “What was he thinking?” the tag line asks. “The biggest misconception” about the sport, Eakle says, “is that it’s dangerous.”

As a hybrid of skateboarding and snowboarding, both with thriving subcultures and potential crossover boarders, mountainboarding looked, despite its gnarliness, like a sure thing. But skateboarders live in a gated community. “Anything that’s a takeoff on skateboarding tends not to be embraced by the skateboard culture,” says Michael Jaquet, marketing director of TransWorld Media, the Oceanside publisher of the most popular skateboarding and snowboarding magazines. “And for whatever reason, right or wrong, the skateboard culture sets a lot of the rules for action sports.”

Skateboarding is a lifestyle, says Steve Astephen, chief executive of the Familie, a Carlsbad action sports management and public relations firm.

“It’s something you act like, something you wear, something you are -- same with snowboarding and surfing. With mountainboarding, there is no identifying.”

And for kids who don’t drive yet, there’s no getting around town on a mountainboard the way they can on skateboards or BMX bikes. They’re bulky, designed like a 4x4 truck for off-road stability, with grippy tires and bindings.

The few, the proud

Todd Sanders, nickname Sparrow, has long blond hair and an incomplete tattoo on his skinny calf. He launched the website SoCalDirtriders.com last year to help boarders hook up for sessions like the one in Carlsbad.

At least once a month the gang gets together to ride a mix of terrain, from undulating rock formations to gently sloping gravel roads. “Bombing down a fire road fills your blood with adrenaline,” Sanders says. “Just knowing there is nothing between you and the ground, going close to 25 miles per hour.”

With few public terrain parks or tracks, they search out hills, build their own jumps and hope the city or a developer doesn’t bulldoze them before the next session. Mountainboarders do bomb down bike trails, and some ski areas rent mountainboards in the off-season, but it’s mostly the older participants in a sport that skews ancient. More than half of boarders are over 21, according to Mountainboarding magazine, a huge liability for potential magazine advertisers and competition sponsors.

“Action sports are teenage driven,” says Jaquet. “The teenage male demographic has buying power and so much free time.”

Still, a good PR guy would probably love to help the sport grow, right? “The answer is ‘no,’ ” Astephen says. “I wouldn’t know how to market it. I wouldn’t have a direction unless it was as a tourist company on a mountain in the summer and mountain biking [seemed] old.”

The folklore goes that the sport started in the 1970s when some rambunctious skateboarders took their boards off-road. A decade later, modified skateboard wheels with tractor treads emerged, but “dirtboards” were still considered a novelty.

From dirtboards up

The early 1990s brought “high-performance” mountainboards designed to look like skateboards on growth hormones. Jason Lee and partner Patrick McConnell, founders of Colorado-based MBS Mountainboards, developed the influential “channel truck,” an axle with suspension for more stability.

Until then, Lee says, “There were modifications to regular skateboards, but not what we would consider a real mountainboard.”

With the specialized truck, plus bindings and air-filled tires that absorbed impact, enthusiasts could finally attack some serious hills and hit big jumps like snowboarders.

But an action sport needs cash flow to encourage innovation and expansion. Once a rider buys a board for $100 to $500 that could last a few years, it’s the only revenue funneling into the sport, except for the cost of the occasional video or magazine. Skateboarding has a massive soft goods market -- shoes, backpacks, clothes -- to support the low profit margin of the actual skateboard deck. Wakeboarding is floated by the powerful boating industry. Mountainboarding lacks a cushion.

It’s also missing out on airtime in arguably the premier action sports showcase: the X Games. “For the past couple years, we have allowed mountainboards to come on-site to do spectator demos,” says spokeswoman Melissa Gullotti. “But they have never been in a competition.”

Mountainboarding shares this expo distinction with upstarts such as shovel racing, wherein riders fly down a snow-packed slope with their rumps in a metal scoop.

“Our evaluation includes a sport’s progression, growth and infrastructure,” Gullotti adds, “as well as a review of viewership, spectator demographic and psychographic as they pertain to that sport.”

Mountainboarding doesn’t make the cut? “[It] doesn’t have a circuit of events to grow the sport,” she says.

There is a modest contest circuit known as CORE, and the All Terrain Boarding Assn. organizes competitions. But mountainboarding has no unified organizing body and no charismatic face to imprint on impressionable kids.

The lack of support, as well as a recent history of little press, leaves the So-Cal Dirt Riders a little insecure and eager for positive attention.

“Make us look good,” Eakle says to a reporter, echoing verbatim the words of several others in separate conversations. “There’s a lot of heart in mountainboarding.”

After a few hours the riders begin to drift away. Eakle unstraps the Velcro on his knee and elbow pads, and laughs when he brings up the subject of butt pads. He describes how fast he was going recently when he slid out and used his butt as a brake. He holds his hands a foot apart indicating the size of the twin wounds. “On each cheek,” he clarifies, then turns and asks if anyone is up for the next session in L.A.

Sean Mortimer is an freelance writer based in Oceanside.