Skateboarding
Blowtorching bushings and field goals on a frozen lake in Minnesota: A skateboarding “mission impossible.”
You may be thinking that Ryan Decenzo and fellow Canadian TJ Rogers are no strangers to skating in snowy temperatures, but what is Southern California born and bred Torey Pudwill doing in here? Turns out this trio can handle anything you put in front of them, even on a multitude of rotating ice skate sculptures. Torey’s signature beanie came in real handy.
If you’re wondering how they got this idea and how this is even done, you’ve got to see what Dan Anderson does with his Minnesota neighborhood each year. He chainsaws a big circle in the ice, attaches an outboard motor to it, gets the whole plate spinning, and sets up a winter wonderland for everyone to enjoy. Pretty rad, right? Well, sooner or later someone would have to adopt this idea and see if they could make it skateable, right?
“I never knew what an ice carousel was and hadn’t seen the videos,” says Decenzo, “but I guess I’m the winter/snow guy for skateboarding now. It all started from Rick McCrank doing it back in the day. I was up for the challenge though,” says Decenzo, “but I didn’t realize it was going to be so much colder than the other things I’ve done. I don’t think many people have skated in those temperatures, it was obscene.”
Cold Gear
Now that you’ve got the idea, we’ve got to let you know that this was shot over three days on a frozen lake in Minnesota. How cold was it? Well let’s hear it from the Southern Californian first: “The way it was pitched to me was just, it’s in Minnesota and it’s going to be ice carousels. And I said I was down,” says Pudwill. “When I got there, it was completely unimaginable. I’ve never been in those sub-zero temperatures before. I wasn’t prepared for it. I didn’t think it through too well. The first thing we skated was like a mini Megaramp that led to a spinning field goal. It wasn’t easy to figure out the timing to thread the needle. If your board doesn’t make it to the other side, it’s falling on either ice or in ice water. That’s something I figured out, if your board touches ice, it just freezes.”
Rogers chimes in, “It was funny to see a full-blooded Californian in the middle of the winter in Minnesota on 30 inches of ice on a little lake—oh man he was so out of his element it was hilarious.”
Pudwill goes on, “You had to wear as many layers as you could—five layers minimum. I had two pairs of socks, I had foot warmers on my socks and shoes. You had to walk out on the lake wearing snow boots, or else your skate shoes would get soaked. I had long johns, a pair of pants and another pair of pants over that, and you’re still freezing. I know TJ had snow pants on and then his pants on over it. I had a thermal shirt, long sleeve shirt, T-shirt, and one big ol’ jacket that went down to my knees, and I don’t like to skate with things on like pieces of flare, sunglasses, gloves, but you also had to wear the gardening gloves—big ‘ol snow gloves. So any time you had to adjust your board with the skate tool, you had to take the gloves off. One of the biggest challenges was just to get comfortable before you even started skating.”
Even Ryan “the snow guy” Decenzo had his temperature tales of woe, “The cold leads to so many other factors: The cold was harder than skating any of the obstacles. You can’t warm up, you can’t feel your feet, your bushings are frozen solid and don’t work. Growing up in Canada helped TJ and me more so than Torey. But TJ was pretty beast, skating without a jacket and gloves at times. Torey and I looked like the kid from A Christmas Story. I knew I could land a trick, but my jacket would be in the way. So you’d take the jacket off, but then you’d get too cold. When I tried to 360 flip the goal post, my feet were completely numb. I kicked out and ran out on the landing wood and it felt like my feet shattered.”
Rogers, being maybe the most adapted to the cold seeing that he’s from Eastern Canada explains, “Even when I was young, I never dressed to that extend to go skate outside. I had on long johns, sweatpants, and splashpants over top. It was pretty heavy.” Rogers recalled that as a young skater, his crew would just barge Toronto’s underground spaces and skate in the malls during the long winters. “I just tried to embrace it all, I could’ve complained, but honestly, I’m from Canada, it gets cold like this, I’m going to thrive out here. I wasn’t even going inside for the warm-up breaks (laughs), I was chilling out there with everyone, I don’t think I even had gloves on at some times.”
Back to Pudwill, the California kid: “After about 20 minutes, it gets pretty unbearable. The Canadians got their tricks quicker than me. There were a couple tricks that I tried for an hour, hour and a half. When you’re that invested, you just have to block out all those factors. That street mentality, I’m not giving up until I get it. The whole crew, the filmers, builders, were gone—they couldn’t stand to stay out there. So it was just me, a filmer and Jonathan Mehring. There was a point where Mehring’s camera wasn’t firing because it was so cold!”
01
Blowtorching Bushings
As you can imagine, these set ups came with their own pitfalls. On the field goal set up, Torey’s board went in the icy drink first try turning it into an actual popsicle. Which brings us to the blowtorching of the bushings. Now this is a technique that Pudwill and Rogers hadn’t heard of, but Decenzo had done this in projects past: “I had blowtorched bushings in previous snow projects,” says Decenzo. “Any slush that gets on your board turns to water and gets your bushings wet. This time, though, any water that got on your board turned to ice. It was the worst scenario. Your griptape would turn into ice. The same thing would happen to your shoes. It felt like a skateboarding Mission Impossible. I don’t know if I ever want to do something that cold again.”
“When the blowtorch came out, that was so genius,” says Pudwill. “I couldn’t believe that it worked. The first day, my board got submerged and my bearings froze, my bushings froze, my griptape was frozen—I thought I was done. We blowtorched it, starting with the bearings, the wheels started spinning great, you could see the water dripping out. My trucks went from not moving, hard as a rock, to loosening up and moving again. My griptape got so frozen that it was cracking! Every single try I had to blowtorch my bushings or else it wouldn’t turn normally. If I waited on the deck too long before dropping in, my board wouldn’t turn—that’s why I kicked out and my board went in the hole.
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No Warmup
There was no extra flatground or anywhere for these guys to push around and get their legs going. “One of the biggest challenges was just to get comfortable before you even started skating. When it was time to skate, you’re like, how do I warm up?” Says Pudwill. “There’s no warm-up at all, it’s just drop in and send it.” However, Pudwill comically revealed that his signature Red Bull beanie came in handy, “That’s where that beanie came in handy! Normally I’m out in the beautiful California sunshine—that thing’s at least 150 degrees under the beanie. Out there it was really helpful.”
03
Hardest to Skate
So which setup was the hardest to skate? For Pudwill, it was the quarterpipe set up that required precise timing to hit the lip, turn around, and make it onto the next landing pad. “The carousel quarterpipe was the hardest thing to skate, it threw my whole equilibrium off. As it spun to the left, anything I was trying to do backside was alley-oop, because the quarterpipe was spinning under you, so you’d end up all twisted up. I had to skate it not-moving. I spent an hour trying to do a kickflip to fakie on it while it was moving and it was not possible.”
For Rogers, it was the merry-go-round flat bar. Pudwill took the boardslide and just before dark, Decenzo pulled off the perfect 50-50 around the whole, damn, thing. “The hardest thing for me to skate was the flatbar. It was a full 360 and it spun. I couldn’t get a trick on it. I was trying a couple boardslides on it and then Torey did one almost first try. So I left it to Torey.” As for Decenzo’s around-the-horn 50-50, Rogers recalls, “Not only did it take him a while, but he was stressing the whole time. That was the last day of the shoot. It was even colder because it was close to getting dark.”
Decenzo confirms, “The circle rail. The problem was that the wax didn’t work in that temperature. You couldn’t get it onto the rail. We were running out of daylight on that one and nothing was working. Torey and I did those tricks raw, just using the wax that was on our boards. It was also the messiest one with water splashing and getting our gear all wet.” Nothing like a buzzer-beater 50-50 on the last day of shooting.
At the end of three frigid days though, each of these guys were gushing about the amount of fun they had and how amazing the crew was. With skate photography legend Jonathan Mehring capturing the epic sessions, everyone felt lucky to be part of such a historic mission, skating and creating. “It’s something that I would’ve never thought to organize but I was super stoked to be a part of it,” said Rogers. “Mehring killed it, we had such a good crew out there. Everyone was tripping, but I was embracing it.”
