Winters are brutal on the east coast. Not only does it mark three grueling months of wet, freezing cold weather, but it also means limited, if any, skating. Us west coast kids get to enjoy year-round skating, sans having to dodge snow and rain.
So as the winter of 2016 approached, Josh Stewart decided to take the Theories of Atlantis gang to the other coast for a Los Angeles clip and escape the cold to keep skating. Los Angeles and New York are two very different terrains; LA is a plethora of sprawling beach town neighborhoods and really bad contemporary architecture, and New York is a cramped and crowded urban mecca.
In a post on Jenkem, Stewart recalls that, "Our local LA friends thought it was ridiculous that we wanted to skate schoolyard spots. But, what they didn’t realize was that those were the spots that had the one thing we lacked the most back in NYC…..space. Being able to skate in a massive open flatground area without a million people in the way is a serious novelty for all of us. But throw in some baby picnic tables and mellow banks surrounding the entire perimeter and it added up to one of the most fun experiences during our entire trip. Taylor Nawrocki put the classic Gardner picnic table to use early into the trip with this switch kickflip step-off."
Escape to LA catches a ton of our favorite skaters - Leo Valls, Ben Gore, Brendan Carroll, Taylor Nawrocki, John Baragwanath, Joe Yates, Jon Nguyen, Bryce Mandell, Vincent Alvarez, Brad Cromer, Walker Ryan, Zac Gracie, Paul Shier, Dustin Eggeling, Christian Maalouf, Danny Montoya, Yonnie Cruz, Stevie Perez, Alex Schmidt, Justin Strubing & Tom Remillard - cruising through LA's small beach towns and capturing that rad aesthetic of classic surf culture in a skate video project.
Watch Escape to LA below.
