gloryhole? see, that means something completely different where I come from...

That's awesome. I want to ride it, too. You go first so I can see the pitfalls. :D

I'm saving the article for my daughter. She wants to be one of the hydraulic engineers that dismantles dams.

When I read your description, I was all: oh, that wouldn't freak me out. But then I saw it and that shit is freaky!

Also: gloryhole? *snurk*

wow

also: "morning glory" hehheh

It HAS been skated, at least the lower part.

At least someone has written about it.

Looking at the intake funnel when it's dry I can see that skating it would be impossible if only because of what looks like 5 inch wide expansion-gap cracks in the concrete casing segments.

Given a nice, smooth, skateable funnel of an appropriate size and radius there's no logical reason why a skateboarder couldn't ride a spiral all the way down, even the near-vertical segments. It would take some pretty precise control of the spiral by the rider, and you couldn't go too fast or too tight of a radius otherwise the g-forces would be too much, and too large a radius obviously wouldn't be enough.

danf: Yeah, there's a pic in that link of a vert biker in the outflow. I've skated pipes like that. Big ones are nice and easy, but it takes a lot of work to keep the speed going and you go scary high but there's just more time to react to stuff. I want to see someone skate the vertical part of the funnel. :)

I saw those pictures once before and they scared me too, partly because I thought it would be so difficult in a weird way not to just throw yourself down them (although I never thought of skating, which is a good idea; then you could probably skate back out too) to see just where, exactly, they would go. Like probably to another planet or a hidden valley full of dinosaurs or just another dimension where the sky is green and the grass is blue or a skating rink made of candy or something. Those things are like the original rabbit hole.

There's one of those intake funnels at the dam near my house. MGL is right - in person, it creates an almost compulsive desire to jump down it, especially when the water level is below the rim.

I also get that feeling when I'm standing on the edge of the damn, looking down, and the water is being released at full capacity. It looks like the best water ride in the world.

Some construction photos. . .

I used to ride my bike by that particular "Glory Hole" as we called it quite often. Thats at Lake Berryessa, and just past the ride up to the dam is a hill called cardiac hill. I think it got it's name because it's steep, but someone actually did die on it of a heart attack during the Davis Double Century one year. Cardiac hill was a good 45 mile training ride starting in Davis. OH, and one of the Zodiac killer attacks took place near there too. I grew up in Davis, and seeing that would freak me out as a kid, but it is eerily calming as an adult. As to skating, I had friends when I was in Jr. High School which would climb up to the outflow and skateboard in there, and that was almost 30 years ago or so. They'd head up there with brooms, sweep out an area and skate in there.

Glory hole is originally a Scots expression.

About an hour ago I figured out how it would be possible to actually make a (much more shallow) funnel-shaped skateboard park feature that led into a wide vertical pipe that would allow you to do a 360 degree wall ride and then exit at the bottom through a tunnel or full-pipe leading to a half-pipe or bowl

Well, I just talked to my brother, who occasionally talks to the Dreampark skatepark guys - and he says they've mocked it up and figured out how to do it, but that it probably would NOT ever be built at any public parks because of how dangerous it would be.

There was also apparently a smaller "morning glory" spillway in Austrially that people skate, and supposedly they've also discussed the possibility of spiraling down the pipe and wallriding it down, but no one has dared it yet.

I would think the greatest threat to one's safety in wallriding a spiral is that you'd get really, really dizzy.

Well, no, the thing is when you do a smooth wallride in a bowl or snakerun it feels like you're just riding a straight line. It's not so much like spinning in circles because "gravity" is "down" through the deck of the board and you're just following that fall line. This is how bowl riders can actually do 360 degree passes around a pool or bowl all on the wall - if the bowl has corner or some sort of ridable change in the curve in the wall - like a kidney bowl has, or a squarish pool. The corners or bumps in the pool become "hills" because the g-force is "down" through them, and the rider can pump off them to add more and more speed.

It would be pretty smooth providing there was just enough g-force and not too much that it got squirrelly, which is what was happening with the wood loops they've been doing, too tight and too much speed, but it's the only way to do a vertical loop. A horizontal loop in a funnel has equalized gravity and g-forces and all that.

A while back there was a cool thread about Glory Holes at the blue place. Then and now they scare the hell outta me. I'm kinda like mgl, I'd be afraid that some sort of voodoo-vortex-alien-government-mind-control beam thingie would convince me that throwing myself into one would be the right thing to do. By just looking at the photos, I want to do it.

Halp meeeee...

I have no idea what you're talking about.

*straps on helmet and pads and starts skating toward California*