Gen Xers Dig The Dirt New Board Sport Requires Wheels, Plenty Of Nerve

Tim Dunlava glides down the hill, hits a jump and flies into a standard snowboarders’ trick - he grabs the board in midair before settling for a landing.

But in midair, Dunlava loses his balance and gravity does the rest.

Instead of falling into a fluffy snowdrift, he slams tailbone-first onto a dirt trail so hard even fire ants won’t dig there.

This is the reality of dirtboarding, the summer trails equivalent of snowboarding that is gaining interest among the “been there, done that” crowd of extreme-sports lovers.

Using large, Tonka truck-like wheels originally designed as skateboard training wheels for small kids, big kids such as Dunlava use them for wild off-road skateboarding that makes snowboarding, downhill mountain biking or conventional skateboarding look like child’s play.

“The moves are a lot like snowboarding, but you gotta have more guts on these,” says Dunlava, 23, southern Oregon’s acknowledged dirtboarding king. “You hurt yourself a lot more. You don’t have soft snow to fall on.”

With more than 50 riders in the Medford-Ashland area, southern Oregon has become one of the fastest-growing regions for this wild brand of adrenaline kick that started in the San Diego area eight years ago.

Dirtboarders take conventional skateboards and give them a wicked retrofit by raising the board and installing 3-inch, rubber all-terrain tires.

They anchor their feet to the boards with toe clips and roar at speeds up to 25 mph down anything from grassy knolls to old logging roads to deer trails, often sprinkling in jumps and wrecks.

“You can bomb grass, rocks. We ride through poison oak,” Brian Tibbils, 20, says of the anything-goes style. “You can ride through anything.”

Tibbils and Dunlava generally ride on a course with trails and jumps on private land near Jacksonville. They ride, generally, in short sessions of “45 minutes, or until we get hurt,” Dunlava says.

Virtually anyone with a conventional skateboard can try it, says Gerry Dunlava, Tim’s 32-year-old brother, who sells dirtboards.

Skaters can start with their new wheels on concrete, where they turn slowly and lethargically. But on grassy hills with small inclines, the boards can pick up surprising speed.

“When you do this on trails, you have to know you’re going to twist your ankle and sprain your knees,” Gerry Dunlava says. “But you can go pretty slow on grass or real small hills. I’ve seen kids 8 to 10 years old riding these in Bear Creek Park.”

It’s the 8-year-olds, who, in a roundabout way, actually inspired dirtboarding’s genesis when inventor Rick Wilson began looking in 1989 for a version of training wheels for young skateboarders.

Back then, skateboard wheels were getting smaller and smaller, and young kids trying to skate would wreck when hitting a simple pebble, Wilson says.

“I thought, ‘Gee whiz, they need a big ol’ tire to get over those rocks,”’ Wilson said.

Wilson, 44, created a prototype formed from a Tonka truck tire and began making them for kids, he says. But Gerry Dunlava - then a skateboarder looking for challenges - and others noticed how these oversized tires fared wonderfully on dirt.

Dirtboarding thus began, spearheaded by Wilson’s tire-selling business, called Xtreme Wheelz Inc., of Poway, Calif.

Any skateboard can be modified for dirtboarding. A set of wheels and risers to create more clearance for the skateboard sells for about $65, with $10 for wheel bearings and $15 for toe clips. Without the toe clips, skaters’ feet fly off the board and they wreck.

The sport is becoming a hit among snowboarders looking for some off-season training, as well as others of the Generation X crowd bent upon finding new and extreme forms of adrenal-tainment.

That group is growing nowhere more strongly than in southern Oregon, Wilson says.

“I’d say, demographically, it’s one of the hottest areas because of the snowboarding community, the lack of skateboard parks and the newness,” Wilson says.

Tim Dunlava started dirtboarding more than five years ago. Though the sport has yet to develop any formal competitions, Dunlava is considered one of the West’s best.

“On a scale of 1 to 10,” Wilson says, “Tim’s probably close to a 9.”