‘Over the road’

I think we can all remember the day when we built our first dirt jump. Mine was probably no different; I’d just got my new bike and had nowhere to ride, so I wagged a day off school and decided to build on our little patch of land ‘over the road’. Thinking back now its scary how much time it took me to build up to doing that tiny jump, but yet I still get the exact same feeling every time I try something new even now……


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After watching Kranked 5 we were bouncing off the walls with adrenaline so we decided to build are first north shore style structure in tribute to Dan Cowan.


We even made a proper gap jump check out the gap on that!!! Gotta be at least 3 feet? Jump count in the garden now = 2. The garden stayed like this for a long time until we finally pulled our finger and got some digging done.


By the end of year 2 of building ‘over the road’ it looked something along the lines of this…

Quite scary seeing that pic, I think even my mum would jump them now?!?!

Anyway after pulling our fingers out we made the jumps grow a bit. Eventually they started to become an acceptable size. Lots of hard graft over winter left them looking like this…


It was all going smoothly, everything was getting that bit bigger each time we’d all meet up for a ride or a dig day. But then we started to use wood one day to build stuff? Don’t know what was going on there, we weren’t exactly ‘skilled’ carpenters. Heres what came out of that stage in life...



After this outburst of woodwork there was a big pause in construction. Nothing went on for a while, I don’t know if we’d given up after failing on many projects but everything seemed to be getting a bit overgrown.



That summer was one of the greatest of our lives. All we did was ride and ride from dawn till dusk. But we needed something else to push us, because I think ‘over the road’ was becoming a bit too tame. So instead of building in the winter like most, when you have soft ground and hours of time to pass, we started building in the summer hols. It could well have been a big mistake wasting all that time basking in the glorious sunshine , but in the end it resulted in the infamous ‘tabletop’ and many new lines.




There is a time where you think I’ve got to stop building and actually go ride, but there’s something that you get hooked on about it?? You always want to build something more creative and impressive than the last. We used this mindset to create a mini bike park throughout the winter of 05 and what we have to this day is an awesome training ground with doubles, drops, gaps, wallrides the works…





I’ve got to thank all my friends who I’ve known since like being 2?! Like Josh and Robin, together I think we’ve made something pretty special in a place where riding your bike is looked down upon instead of being accepted.