The CAP is a waterway that transports water from the Colorado River, starting at Lake Havasu, to Central and Southern Arizona. At the time of construction, it was the single longest water transportation project ever authorized by the United States Congress and combines an intricate system of canals, tunnels, pipelines, and pumping stations. The design and specifications for the project were provided by the Bureau of Reclamation. The 173-mile Granite Reef Aqueduct portion of the CAP is comprised of an 80-foot wide, concrete-lined canal carrying the largest flow of water in the system and crosses seven major river beds and washes by means of inverted siphons 21 feet in diameter. Six of these seven siphons, ranging in length from one-quarter mile to almost two miles in length, were constructed from what was at the time the largest precast, prestressed concrete pipe ever manufactured. The pipe has an internal diameter of 252 inches, a wall thickness of 21 inches, and each segment was 22.6-feet long and weighted as much as 225 tons.
—Exponent Consulting (private pipe repair contractor)
When I was in high school, we wrote the company that made the pipes (Ameron) and they sent us maps of the CAP project. So we were able to find the different pipe construction sites…and barge them.
—Steve Pingleton (Arizona skate pioneer)
It might very well have been [Warren] Bolster who got a tip from a kid, as tips were coming into Skateboarder magazine all the time from skaters all over the country back then. All we’d heard was that there were these mythic cement pipes in the middle of the desert that were biblical in size, supposedly bigger than anything anyone had ever seen.
Stacy Peralta (Z-Boy, film director, entrepreneur)
It was like magic when the letter arrived inviting me to check out some 22-foot pipes in a desert area off the beaten track—much farther than I normally go for skate photos. Questions had to be answered. Was it a bust? Were there fences, guards, certain prime hours? How was the weather? Which direction did the pipes face in the morning? In the afternoon? Phone calls were made to round up the best pipe riders in the business: Waldo Autry, Bob Biniak, Tom Inouye, Stacy Peralta, Gregg Weaver, and Laura Thornhill. Taking the main turnoff, and still three miles away, we could barely see some giant structures across the sandy, flat panorama.
—Warren Bolster (Surfer photo editor, Skateboard magazine founder) posthumously excerpted from his writings
The reveal was astonishing, very much like what I would expect to feel pulling up to the far side of the moon. We’d been driving on this dirt road for probably 20 to 30 minutes when, in the far distance up ahead we began to see the tops of these giant cement donuts faintly appearing over the tops of the saguaro cactus trees. There were many of them scattered across the desert floor, probably 20 to 30, each about 20-feet wide and 22 feet in diameter. We finally arrived at what looked like a military outpost with wire fences surrounding the perimeter, yet at the moment it seemed abandoned. There were no people around but plenty of hardware and these gargantuan tractors—the biggest tractors I’d ever seen in my life, with tires as large as a two-story house. It turns out those were the machines that picked up the huge sections of pipe and moved them into place.
—Stacy Peralta
THE BIG BAG OF ANESTHETIC
Hijinx on the road home from the Pipes hinterlands.
By John O’Malley
The r&d excursions we took probably looked different than your average company junket. Ours were road trips to a hole in the ground. Among these were a few trips out to the huge, full pipes that were part of the Central Arizona Project outside of Phoenix. The last one got a little crazy. Funding for the CAP was buffaloed through Congress by President Lyndon Johnson in 1968, in order to “bring Arizona’s fair share of water from the Colorado River.” Construction began in 1973. The water is conducted largely by canal, but a good portion of it flows underground through a perfectly-smooth concrete pipe, 20-odd feet in diameter. Work on the CAP was halted for a time when a recession dried up its funding. This left a miles-long underground pipeline exposed and additional random sections scattered about the desert. It was like some magnificent Brigadoon/skate dream.
God is truly great.
You could ride the buried portion of the CAP continuously until the light ran out. I was on my last run on a sunny Sunday at just past 11 a.m. when I fell from the roof of that grand tunnel, landed right on my face, and broke my front tooth in half. This obviously caused immediate and excruciating pain. As most people know, dentists are all closed on Sundays, but Don Sheridan, who’d made the trip with us, had a family friend who agreed to patch me up during off-hours. The only problem was that he was five hours away, on the coast.
We packed up fast, made a pit stop for a half pint of whiskey, and hit the freeway heading west at warp speed. Now, I don’t advocate drinking and driving, nor do I believe that I actually have a higher pain threshold after hoisting a few whiskeys, but this thing hurt like a motherfucker, so I was wide open to any pain-relief solutions. We probably got the idea to anesthetize with booze because that’s what they do in the movies—you know the scene in the show where they get some poor bastard drunk, give him a stick to bite on, and then saw his leg off quick as a bunny? I probably looked at the whiskey like a flaky, pain-management plan B.
I say plan B because we also had a plan A: a big bag of cocaine, which worked like a charm. Coke is historically used as a topical anesthetic for oral application and is some kind of grandfather to Novocaine, which of course is the only reason that we kept it in stock. (As a skater, you just never knew when anesthesia might be needed.) I dabbed a little onto the exposed nerve with my pinky and…violà!
It being a Sunday, the westbound traffic to the coast was predictably heavy with the sacred armada of California pleasure-craft headed home to harbor after a weekend getaway on their “fair share” of the Colorado River—motorhomes and contractor pickups towing massive campers and boats, all making for the coast at about 70 miles per hour. I was piloting our crew’s El Camino, which had the biggest engine that Chevy made in 1977, trying to keep our speed to a discrete 90 miles per hour while weaving cautiously through traffic, gingerly dabbing coke onto my tooth, and nipping on the whiskey as prescribed by, you know, the movies.
We’d been on the road for maybe twenty minutes when an Arizona State Trooper heading in the opposite direction clocked me and immediately set into the chase. Fortunately, he gave me very early warning by immediately flipping his lights on. He also had to double back to the next off-ramp to make a U-turn, and that was still a long ways off.
Hmmm…
The next exit was still not in sight, so I wasn’t exactly sure how to play it. Stopping and speaking with the police seemed like a bad idea, with the whiskey and medicinal cocaine that we had in the car with us. Plus Tommy Kundinger, a minor, was riding bitch in the bed of the El Camino, his frightened face plastered up against the rear windshield.
I decided that an evasive maneuver was the way to go. My exit appeared up ahead, but the trooper was now in my rearview mirror, lights-a-blazin’ and closing in fast. Realizing I needed to get out of his crosshairs for a minute and stall, I pulled up next to an extra-large Winnebago and blocked all traffic from passing, creating a buffer of vehicles between us and the patrol car. That bought some time, but my buffer began eroding as cars peeled away to let the cop pass—all blaring lights and sirens, ready to pounce.
As the exit approached, I accelerated ahead of the Winnebago, hopped directly in front of it, and eased down on my brakes. The motorhome decelerated sympathetically and we slowed the entire right lane down to about 30 miles-per-hour, which gave me sight cover and flushed the traffic into the left lane. I monitored the patrol car in my side-view mirror, and stalled…and stalled…and stalled, until my trooper, now unobstructed, bolted right past me just as I rolled right into the freeway off-ramp. Unfortunately, the guy was frosty and caught my trick right away. He hit his brakes and swerved into the right lane, tracking my flight in his mirrors. I came whipping off the ramp and spotted an intersection with a shuttered gas station dead ahead. I quickly ducked for cover behind the building and peered through the bay doors as my trooper came wailing down the onramp the wrong way. Luckily he gauged my trajectory wrong and breezed right past us, heading errantly up the service road.
I zoomed back on the freeway faster than hell and never looked back. We arrived at the dentist’s office very late and very, very wired.
—
Excerpted from John O’Malley’s memoir Urethane Revolution
(The History Press)
While lacking the aesthetic, sensual, and purity levels of riding waves, [this] was comparable to all but the very best surfing sensations. And it was here everyday.
Warren Bolster
It was very similar to journeying deep into mainland Mexico during the early 1970s, where you’re following verbal bread crumbs and rumors that have been passed down over the years. You’re driving down various dirt roads leading to nowhere, and you’re never quite sure where you are or where you’re going until you turn the final corner and stumble onto the greatest pointbreak you’ve ever seen in your life.
—Stacy Peralta
We started to see pro skateboarders from California out there, doing new things called “fakies” and “180 kickturns” in the pipe sections. Once skateboarders had discovered riding vertical was possible in empty swimming pools, [the CAP] Pipes became the ultimate big game for us skateboarders to get higher—beyond vertical. I recall our goal riding Pipes was to try to get our boards above our heads.
—Steve Pingleton
They were awe inspiring and amazing but in no way intimidating. They were like pulling up to perfect, flawless, 12- to 15-foot surf with not a drop out of water out of place. They were the largest pipes we’d ever seen or encountered, but they were made with such precision and with such perfect execution that it was impossible to be intimidated by them. They were beckoning us to ride them. It also didn’t hurt that they were lying amidst this crazy, western desert setting. The entire tableau was so foreign and otherworldly. It was like John Wayne meets George Jetson.
There’s an art to pouring concrete and there is an art to forming concrete. These pipes had to be built with an inner surface that was like glass so that any foreign particles in the water wouldn’t have a foothold. The glass-like finish made for the perfect skating medium. There was no friction between the concrete and our urethane wheels. The speed and ease of riding them was unlike anything I had felt up to that time. It was just absolute gliding perfection.
—Stacy Peralta
Bailing 11-feet up in a 22-foot pipe is hairball. Better to ride it back down and bail at the bottom. It never feels like you’re as high as you are. When you’re above vertical, you’ll feel the wall right behind you. I found that if I didn’t exhale at the top, I’d get pitched out.
Waldo Autry (skater)
We rode the various pipe sections all day long. We just pigged out on what was up to that point fantasy skateboarding, sampling perfect section after perfect section—each one a mirror image of the last. This was terrain that we hadn’t even had the ability to dream up and yet here it was, pure dream skating. But we soon found out that there was something even better than these individual sections. One of the skaters in our crew discovered a mineshaft-like door that led to an underground walkway, which led us to where all of these pipe sections were fastened onto the miles-long pipe that would eventually transport the water. We were now underground and this fitted pipe was probably a football field long. It was on a slightly-steep angle and skating on this increased our speed dramatically—and the increased speed allowed us to reach heights well over vertical, which we were unable to reach riding the separate sections. Riding the underground pipe was nothing short of skating Nirvana. It was unlike anything I’d ever ridden, unlike anything I’d ever imagined, and unlike anything I would ever ride again.
—Stacy Peralta
As it stands now (April 1977), the whole project may be abandoned soon. While the purpose of this project is to provide water to the parched, drought-stricken area, opponents say by the time it’s completed it won’t supply enough water anyway. Whatever the case, it was a $1.7 billion going on $4 billion skatepark. By the time you read this, it will be sealed up completely, regardless of the project’s uncertain future.
—Warren Bolster
[Feature Image Caption: Centennial. Beehive. Hassayampa. The Pipe spots were scattered across the Southwest like waypoints in the Mentawais. Chris Cortum, 1978. Photo by William Sharp.]
