Skater’s MegaRamp is ‘Dreamland’ for pros

There are narrow, pockmarked roads in the hills of east Vista that wind around citrus groves and large chunks of land with houses and horses.

It’s like driving in a maze, so you have to want to find Bob Burnquist’s MegaRamp if you are to see one of the true Meccas of modern skateboarding. And when you round that final curve and view it for the first time, the jaw drops, because it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen in someone’s backyard.

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Bob Burnquist’s ramp in his Vista backyard is training ground for X Games. The 39-year-old will try to keep the streak alive Friday in the 2016 Austin X Games Skateboard Big Air.

Standing 60 feet tall at its peak and spanning the length of several football fields, the MegaRamp at first glance looks like an aging wooden roller coaster. Or maybe some sort of pagan temple.

A hundred years from now, people may find the Mega and wonder of the rituals performed and sacrifices made here.

There have been plenty of both. Men break bones here. They suffer horrendous slams, sometimes dropping three and four stories to the flat ground and knocking themselves unconscious.

Then they get back up and do it again because there’s nothing quite like the thrill of zooming, on four small wheels, 40 mph down a ramp, airing over a 70-foot gap and launching up the massive quarterpipe to float some 40 feet above the ground.

“It’s scary every time,” Burnquist says.

A dual Brazilian and American citizen, Burnquist has staked his life and career at the Mega. It has made him a worldwide star in action sports, with his record 29 X Games medals, including 14 gold.

In the last nine years, Burnquist has never finished off the podium in the X Games and has won nine gold in Big Air on the MegaRamp. Competing with a fractured arm, he achieved a double last year by capturing the Skateboard Big Air and Big Air Doubles with BMX rider Morgan Wade.

The 39-year-old will try to keep the streak alive Friday in the 2016 Austin X Games Skateboard Big Air.

In the only two times in the last six years that Burnquist hasn’t won Big Air gold, he has been beaten by San Diegans who train regularly on his ramp: 27-year-old Elliot Sloan and 16-year-old Tom Schaar.

They are among a crew who show up regularly for skate sessions with Burnquist, the action heating up particularly at this time of year as the X Games near.

“It’s like the fighter going into the cage and they lock the door behind him. No one knows what it’s like until you’re living it,” Burnquist said on an afternoon last week as he and his friends strapped on their pads, chest protectors and helmets in preparing to skate.

They even put duct tape over the laces of their shoes. Why? Because they shred to pieces otherwise, as the skaters slide regularly on their knees.

“When you’re competing,” Burnquist said, “it is the scariest time and most intense time we have all year. Most of those times I’ve gotten hurt were in those environments. The tension is in the air.”

For this practice session, the first one on the ramp, and the one who will be the last to skate in near-darkness two hours later, is Jake Brown. The 41-year-old Australian suffered a fall in the 2007 X Games so frightening, so ghoulish — his shoes exploding off his feet on impact — that people who don’t know an ollie from a kickflip recognize him.

Brown’s injuries that night: fractured wrist, fractured vertebrae, bruised liver, bruised lung, ruptured spleen, concussion.

But this is the same skater who, with all of the practice he’s done on Burnquist’s ramp, has achieved some of Big Air’s greatest tricks.

“Tenfold,” Brown said of the advancement of Big Air skateboarding because of Burnquist’s Vista ramp. “The first couple of years we had nowhere to practice. They would just set up the ramp (at the X Games site) and give us four or five days to get ready.”

Burnquist bought the house and the land in Vista in 1999 because it had a front yard that was perfect for building a wooden skateboard pool (now concrete) that became a destination for pro skateboarders. That led to the making of a corkscrew ramp in which Burnquist crossed a gap while skating upside down.

Then in 2005, inspired by pioneer Danny Way’s original MegaRamp at his Point X Camp in Aguanga, Burnquist purchased an additional seven acres to expand his backyard and create his own Mega, funded by himself and his sponsors.

“I look at it now, and it’s just as amazing for me as it is for people seeing it for the first time,” Burnquist said. “There is so much stuff that has gone on here. Everything has had its phases and its time.”

The property has been dubbed “Dreamland,” and Burnquist immortalized it and himself in an outrageous 2013 video that concludes with the skater dropping into the Mega from a helicopter and later riding up the quarterpipe to get airborne and tap his board on the chopper’s rails before descending.

YouTube views of the video: 3.96 million to date.

The fame of the Mega attracts looky-loos and wanna-be Big Air daredevils, of course. Sometimes, Burnquist said, he obliges those young guys who navigate the maze to his house on their skateboards.

“I would have barged (onto the property),” Burnquist said with a laugh. “I’m sure guys have barged in for a session I don’t even know of. I would have done the same thing.”

The father of 8- and 16-year-old girls, Burnquist isn’t showing signs of slowing down in his skating. There are new tricks to learn, he said, and boundaries to be pushed. He does admit, though, to having a few more thoughts of his own mortality.

“Before the slams, there’s a mind-set,” he said of fearlessness. “And you see it in the kids. You hope they don’t have that traumatic experience, because when you have one, it doesn’t go away.

“But there’s a glory in the slams, too. The glory comes in doing it when you know what can happen to you.”

tod.leonard@sduniontribune.com