CLASSIC SPOT
The Gloryhole
50 THE
In 1948.
the Solano
Project was autho-
rized for the Bureau of
Reclamation by the
Secretary of the Interior. The
scope of the project was to
trash a small NorCal town, dam
a creek, flood a valley, and build
a lake. Once the paperwork was
signed, the government went about
Its duty of buying the property out
from under the residents of the
Berryessa Valley, burning their homes.
and exhuming their graves. By 1957,
Monticello Dam was completed. Putah
© Creek was dammed, and the town of
Monticello was history.
Some twenty years later, skate-
boarders discovered and began to
exploit an incidental feature of the dam:
a gigantic concrete spillway tube
designed to control the water level
behind it. The pipe is 28 ft in diameter,
almost 450
it long and, at its
deepest point, over 200 ft
underground. They named it
Gloryhole after the giant intake
structure that rises up behind the
dam above the surface of the lake.
There are two available experiences at
Gloryhole. The most common, but by no
means pedestrian, is to arrive, clean out a few
sections up by the mouth, and that's what you
get. You've got to run up as high as you can, fight
your way up to 9 o'clock, and work the pipe as
long and as hard as possible. It's an endurance
test-5 or 6 ft over vert walls, and your body is
screaming at your lungs, demanding more oxygen.
Apparently, Malba hit 10 o'clock back in '89 (about 6
ft over vert). Good fuckin' luck.
While the basic Gloryhole experience pretends to
be unbeatable, the essential Gloryhole experience reg-
isters a solid 10 on the Richter Scale. That would be
"getting the elbow," which means having the opportu-
nity to drop into the 28 ft fullpipe from 9 o'clock and
working it from there-all 450 ft down the line. Milking
it. Come on out. Let's see what you got.
-Curtis Hsiang
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