But it goes beyond just increasing the number of female skaters. We’d like to see to see increased prize purses and coverage. Currently, the gap between male and female prize purses is absolutely enormous. Take the X Games for example. Cara-Beth Burnside took first place in vert and was awarded $2,000. Pierre Luc Gagnon also took first but wound up with $50,000. In fact, if you look at the overall prize purse for the X Games, male skaters had a total prize purse that was twenty times that of females. ($343,350 for the men vs. $17,000 for the women.). Thankfully, things are changing. Thanks to Burnside’s dedication, she has been able to get prize purses increased (most recently at the Slam City Jam).

The single engine Cesna was in obvious trouble as it buzzed the race course. Racers watched the plane lose elevation as it tried to sputter over Vail Pass, headed for the big digger. Theplane flew around a bend in the valley and went out of view. One minute later, the highway patrol and firefighters that were on hand for the Timeship Racing Vail Pass Downhill were off to a more urgent plane crash rescue. And with that bit of drama...

Marcus Vorwaller is the creator and webmaster of Silverfishlongboarding.com (SF). If you don’t know about SF already, it’s a website that offers longboard forums, reviews, and articles. Marcus may be better known to the riding community by his online username, zzzMarcus. Since inception five years ago, SF has seen dramatic growth and currently gets about sixty thousand unique visits a month. No marketing, no advertising – just strong word of mouth.

Imagine what it woiuld feel like if you went out longboarding and ove 200 other skaters joined in. That is what is happening in British Columbia right now.

We knew Oregon gets too hot in the summer and too damn rainy in the winter—so fall it was. I don’t recall the three in the morning wake up call was not on the itinerary. I woke up in Fresno and took over the wheel to Weed. The wheel was steering the Gravity Team to the concrete art recently labored in Oregon. The Team included, Jesse Parker, Roger Mihalko, Dustin “Ddog” Taylor, Ed Latus, Paul Santilli, myself and Breamo, who organized the expedition and brought a bunch of camera bags. We chose to enter the beaver state from the East and head North to Klamath Falls.