Chris Cope is one of those peculiar examples of a skater coming out of seemingly nowhere and becoming an instant favourite. Gaining a cult following from a handful of photos in Thrasher after moving to San Diego from Texas, heavily localising and ripping Washington Street a new one on the reg, putting out an incredible part for Route 44, followed by getting on the emergent Scram Skates.

Read the first part in our loose fullpipe-oriented series - Our Extended article on Blood Wizard’s The Occult Part Three.

Chris’ first photo in Thrasher, December 2011, and the inspiration for this article - What an introduction!

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The topic of this edition of our Extended series is the aforementioned Route 44 part.

The intro consists of a long line carving through the above pipe, a lengthy backside powerslide and a gap-out bodyvarial to wallride followed by flashes of a couple of the notable tricks in the part.

The first few clips in the part itself see Chris take his unique truck selection and pool-schooling to an unorthodox pool where anyone who wants to hit the coping must gap onto it before popping back into the transition - Which Chris makes the most of with his opening trick - a frontside 5-0, one of the most integral tricks of transition skateboarding and one that shouldn’t really lend itself to being popped into and out of. He follows this up with a Cab to pivot of all things, again gapped out to and out of, before a more sensible, given the circumstances, invert.

Chris litters the part with unorthodox tricks including a couple of distinct, possibly unintended combinations such as a fastplant + Cab into tailblock and a frontside 5-0 to tailslide and backside nosebluntslide into and over the hip at Washington Street respectively.

As mentioned earlier, he gets stuck into his local throughout the part with some properly gnarly and pretty unique tricks - alley-pop invert over the big hip, frontside lipslide to sugarcane around the corner and boardslide transferring into the main section before bluntsliding the other way later in the part.

The (almost) ender is the fullpipe loop fully carved into down through the pipe from the intro line, followed by the ender proper - an invert switched to Eggplant mid stall on an incredibly sketchy-looking private vert ramp, as Peter Hewitt looks on… If I’d have mentioned this last clip at the start of the piece I could have saved writing the rest of it, right?

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