0700 Snake Ditch Recon, Mid-December / Phoenix, Arizona

Preface

0700 Snake Ditch Recon: Local Ditch Authority Michael Pistrui sent me a mysterious image text of what looked like a brand new water retention basin. This thing has a killer ditch running through it. No cross streets in the pic and PistruDog didn’t know either. It was a photo of the television. If I were smart, I would have just gone on that channel’s website to watch the news story myself. Instead, I did a search of City of Phoenix Retention Basin Projects. Sure enough pulled up a graphic of current projects and their locations. A quick cross-check against the latest Google Map Satellite image was done. I found the locale of what I thought was in the Pistrui File.

As all good skateboarders know, sometimes the activity requires some covert operations without all the homies and this was one of them. Is it a bust? Is there fencing? Signs? Cameras? Without telling anyone, Ryan and I dipped out early on a Saturday morning to fulfill our skate addiction. We headed towards South Mountain. The Skate Gods were smiling upon us. The Mid-December early morning weather was what we call ‘Chamber of Commerce Weather’ out here. AZ is the envy of the rest of the country. Once we reached our destination we scouted a proper parking spot within the neighboring hood and headed towards the unknown. Two of the three obstacles were in place and we decided to roll the dice.

Reap the rewards

This is where Life gets worth Living. The reward was a bounty of inclined and curved concrete dreams are made of. Sure, this was recon, we had no cleaning tools and there was some mud in areas…but the potential is REAL. We were able to surf our way up and down the 3 foot perfectly smooth banks. It gently descended to a low spot in the center of the basin. The incline towards the opposite end was so mellow. I could pump up it towards the snake head shaped culvert at the end. There are a couple of areas that intersect the snake and form hips that you can carve through without pushing. SUPER FUN! We knew our situation and surroundings. Ryan and I knew not to blow out our good time by staying too long. We were out of there and on our way to our next spot.

Conclusion

We got back from the 0700 Snake Ditch Recon. Ryan realized that the initial pics from Pistrui didn’t match up to what we skated. This means we went to a DIFFERENT brand new retention basin! There is more out there! Go get it! The City of Phoenix has no idea they built a multi-use skate park. This could be enjoyed by a lot of people if only some red tape were cut…..any takers?