BMX: The History of Sheep Hills
The background of the BMX jumps in Costa Mesa, California that spawned many of the best Mid School BMX dirt jumpers anywhere
Sheep Hills local from the 1990’s, Midget Cory Walters, spins a flat 360 as Cody Brown bails on the landing right in front of him, during a Boozer Jam in the early 2020’s. #steveemigphotos
A long time ago (OK, about 34 years or so), in a place far, far away (Costa Mesa, California), a weird tribe of mound builders evolved. OK, maybe DEvolved, but that’s more fun. Either way, this crew began to build small earthen mounds, in an obscure area of brushy trees and oil wells, between Costa Mesa and Huntington Beach. These weren’t the Adena people, or some other culture like that, building giant burial mounds. This little tribe didn’t build Cahokia, near St. Louis, or the Great Serpent Mound in Ohio. The mounds of this small, rag tag tribe weren’t built to track the movement of the stars, or for scared ceremonies, or to honor the ancestors. This small group of mounds, originally built by guys then known as Hippy Jay and Hippy Sean, built mounds to jump BMX bikes. With just a couple of shovels, rakes, a bucket or two and a lot of work, they built mounds to get air, learn tricks, and to just plain have fun. This began in 1990.
Jay told me that he originally called the jumps “Hollywood,” after former pro racer, and hardcore jumper, Mike “Hollywood” Miranda. Mike had built some jumps farther up the hill, where the condos by 19th Street and Balboa Boulevard, in Costa Mesa, are now. Not long after Jay and Sean started building jumps, riders started showing up, and the local kids of that area started calling these new jumps Sheep Hills. Even Hippy Jay himself, one of the original builders, didn’t know where the name “Sheep Hills” came from. There are no sheep, and no hills in the actual jumping area.
For those of you who don’t know any Spanish, the word “mesa” in Spanish means a flat topped natural area, like a “table” of land. The hills near Sheep Hills go up to the large Costa Mesa mesa. That big mesa was once a place where shepherds grazed herds of sheep and goats in the 1800’s, maybe even the early 1900’s. There’s a bar in Costa Mesa, on Newport Boulevard, called Goathill Tavern (141 beers on tap!), that pays homage to that history. There were no sheep around when Hippy Jay and Hippy Sean started building jumps in this out-of-the-way place in late 1990. And there are no hills by the jumps, you have to pedal like mad to hit each line. But the name Sheep Hills stuck.
Unknown rider with a classic X-up through the Boozer line at Sheep Hills, during Boozer Jam 2020. Mike “Boozer” Brown was a diehard BMX racer, Sheep Hills Local, and jump builder at Sheep, and he built this line. Mike was paralyzed from the waist down, in a racing accident, in 2011. A couple years later, Sheep Hills Locals started holding the Boozer Jam annually, to raise money to help Mike and his mom. Mike had several health issues, and passed away in 2019, and the Boozer Memorial Jam is held annually in his honor. #steveemigphotos
One big problem with BMX dirt jumps is that they usually get built on someone else’s land. Then the land owner gets pissed off, or worried about liability issues, and the jumps get plowed. When Sheep Hills was built, it was deep in a chunk of unused oil company land, surrounded by small, brushy trees. It was a hidden little meadow between the Santa Ana River bed, and the edge of Costa Mesa. A few homes on the edge of the surrounding mesa could see the jumps, but seemed to ignore them. At the time, BMX dirt jumping was not really a sport of its own, but usually a side event held at national BMX races to stoke and entertain the crowd.
The top jumpers of that era, the early 1990’s, were guys like Chris “Mad Dog” Moeller, Dave Clymer, John Paul Rogers, Todd Lyons, and several other guys living in the first serious BMX house, in Westminster, several miles away. It was called the P.O.W. House, for Pros Of Westminster, where 8 to 12 BMX riders at a time lived, including the guys above as well as Alan Foster, Lawan Cunningham, Jay Lonergan, Mike Griffin, Eric Millman, John Salamne, Chris Sales, Jason Thompson, and a few others. Along with Hippy Jay and Hippy Sean, and a few other locals, like Mike “Boozer” Brown, they were the first riders to session Sheep Hills in late 1990, 1991 and 1992.
The first riding set-up at Sheep Hills were mainly three berms, built inside each other in long curves, with transfers possible between some of the jumps. There was also a natural bowl farther back in the meadow, with a jump into and a jump out of the bowl. In the early days of the P.O.W. House, Sheep Hills was one of the main places where the those guys jumped, along with Hidden Valley and Edison in Huntington Beach, and the small jumps in the P.O.W. House backyard. I was the first to put the P.O.W. House in a video, and you can see the backyard jumps in 1990 at 33:50 in The Ultimate Weekend, my 1990, self-produced video, immediately followed by footage of the Edison High school jumps.
One of the current top locals at Sheep Hills, Mike “Hucker” Clark, throws a backflip over Titties (the name of that jump) at a Boozer Jam in 2020 at Sheep Hills. #steveemigphotos
Before Sheep Hills came along, teenage dirt jumpers Chris Moeller and Greg Scott were frustrated by how many bikes they were bending and breaking while jumping. They found a welding shop, and had a couple of custom designed frames made, in 1987. The more durable frames became popular, and other riders wanted to get one. That launched the garage company, S&M Bikes, which has had strong ties to Sheep Hills since, sponsoring many of the local riders from the early 1990’s on. S&M Bikes, and sister company Fit Bike Company, are still a major force among Sheep Hills riders.
When these trails were new, in the early 1990’s, riders usually came over the river from Brookhurst, and had to cross the small creek on rocks, and then walk along a rabbit-sized foot trail, to get back to the jumping area. In the late 1980’s, I worked at Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboards/Vision Street Wear video production company, which was up on the Costa Mesa mesa, not far from Sheep. Pat, our cameraman there, in 1988, once told me someone found a four foot long alligator in that tiny creek, several years earlier. I’ve never been able to find proof of that story, but it wouldn’t surprise me. If someone had a small alligator that got too big to handle, that creek would be a pretty obvious place to illegally let it go. I’ve seen a 7 to 9 foot python in Laguna Canyon, obviously a pet someone let go, so a small alligator in an area like Sheep Hills is possible. If you have a reptile you can’t handle, find a good home for it, don’t just let them loose. But the alligator was the first story I heard about that area. There was also a rumor that some skateboarders has built a mini ramp hidden in the little trees. I went looking for it several times in 1988-89, but never found it.
In the first few seasons of Sheep Hills, during the early 1990’s, Southern California’s winter rainy season would flood the lowlands, and the jump area would turn into unrideable muck. From December to about March of each year, Sheep Hills became part of the wetlands, then in the spring the trails would be rebuilt. As the jumps and the different lines got rebuilt, they would get redesigned as well. Each year, as riders’ skills improved, the jumps got taller, longer, and eventually steeper. The original natural bowl got rebuilt, and is now the Titties jump, the main style jump at Sheep these days. There was a line of doubles along the old fence, which was the border to the pond area. That pond is where the water came from to water the jumps, first with buckets, and later with a pump and hoses.
One of the main forces to come out of Sheep Hills in the late 1990’s and 2000’s, Cory “Nasty” Nastazio. Tabletop 360 over Titties at Boozer Jam 2020. Cory lives, and, and still rides hard, in the inland empire now. #steveemigphotos
K.O.D. (King Of Dirt), was the biggest jump at Sheep, in the mid and late 1990’s, built to practice for the “huge” jumps at jumping contests of that era, as the X-Games made BMX dirt jumping a televised sport. K.O.D. was a 7 foot tall set of doubles, then a roller, followed by another tall set of doubles. K.O.D. is still there, but Titties has taken over as the main style jump in recent years.
Around 1998, Stephen Murray, from the U.K., built a four foot high set of doubles next to K.O.D., with a 26 foot gap, 27 feet from actual takeoff to landing, followed by a set of doubles about 21 feet long. He called this line The English Channel. You can see this line being jumped in my 2001 video Animals, in the intro (With SHL Shaun Butler commenting), and later on in the video. To date, The English Channel is the longest set of doubles ever built at Sheep Hills, and it’s been torn down for many years. The Kiddie Pack jumps are in that area now.
In such an obscure location, the jumps at Sheep Hills went largely unnoticed for 3 or 4 years, except by the handful of houses on the edge of the mesa, that could see the riding from above. Then the riders accidentally drained the entire pond nearby, using a pump, to water the jumps. City officials tried to figure out where the pond’s water went, and found the jumping trails. I think the swamp draining happened in 1993 or 1994. After that, the tiny foot trail into the jumps was built into a wide trail that a police car could drive down. Sheep Hills has been public knowledge since that time.
Living in the P.O.W. House, and with other riders during that time, I remember guys being worried that Sheep would finally get bulldozed, like most jumping trails do. For reasons unknown, the city didn’t plow the jumps. The police did roll through at times after that, and could put a damper on any nonsense going on, so the city let the trails live on.
Shawn Butler, longtime SHL, watching the first guys to hit the 27 foot gap of The English Channel jump, in 1998. Video still from the Animals video (2001). #steveemigphotos
That’s a good thing, because a lot of local Huntington Beach and Costa Mesa area kids started riding at Sheep Hills, and became the next wave of jumpers to come out of the H.B./Costa Mesa BMX scene. This was the era when Ryan “Barspinner” Brennan, Shaun Butler, Josh Stricker, Freddy Chulo, Marvin Lotterle, Adam and Jason Pope, Jason “Timmy” Ball, Neal Wood, Scott Yoquolet, “Boozer” Mike Brown, Jason “Dogger” German, Jason Thompson, Emmett Crooms, Deathride Dave, Midget Cory Walters, Ricky Rat, Mental Ian, Religious Rich, and a few others rode there daily. Alan Foster’s little brother, Brian Foster, moved to Westminster from the East Coast, and became a local, and one of the top racing and jumping pros of that era. Jimmy Levan road Sheep when he lived in the area, Troy McMurray rode there, Keith Treanor and John Povah, more street riders that trails riders, rode there in the 90’s.
Classic Sheep Hills video footage:
Fox Air Raid- Alan and Brian Foster, Todd Lyons- 1996
ESPN- “The Legendary Sheep Hills”- Brian Foster, Todd Lyons, Scott Yocolet, other locals- 1997?
JNCO Commercial- Cory Nastazio 1998?
Mike “Hucker” Clark- “Welcome to ODI”- 2015
Eric Mattson riding Sheep Hills 1997-1999
Where the original riders of Sheep were mostly hardcore BMX racers, many of them pros, this second wave raced a little, but most of them focused mostly on jumping. This crew, the second wave, called themselves the Sheep Hills Locals, or SHL. Most of them found sponsors, either through S&M Bikes or another company, and several of them were top dirt jumpers in the first few X-Games, from 1995 to 2000 or so. This group really put Sheep Hills in the minds of BMX riders worldwide, through lots of magazine photos, some videos, and TV coverage.
With Sheep Hills becoming known worldwide as home to about half of the top jumpers of that era, a few more riders became locals in the late 1990’s, the third wave. Cory “Nasty” Nastazio, Stephen Murray, Chris Duncan, and top racer Christophe Leveque, were the standout new Sheep Hills riders of that era, joining all the others riding the trails regularly then.
As the years passed, Sheep Hills officially became part of Talbert Regional Park, under the city of Costa Mesa. These mounds of dirt in a really out of the way area, became a tourist attraction. From the late 1990’s on, it wasn’t unusual to go to Sheep and find BMXers or mountain bikers from Europe, Japan, or maybe Australia, who traveled to the U.S. to visit the legendary U.S. BMX spots, Sheep Hills among them. In roughly ten year waves of popularity going up and down, BMX and dirt jumping has continued to grow worldwide, and there are jumps in many places that are now bigger and better than Sheep Hills. Riders from other scenes got better, and rose into the top ranks. Mountain bikers learned to ride their bikes in the 1990’s, and that spawned big wheeled jumping bikes. While Sheep Hills was joined by many other great riding scenes, there are still top level BMX jumpers riding Sheep on a regular basis, Mike “Hucker” Clark probably being the most local at this point. Top female jumper Jesse Gregory rides there, Tucker Smith rides there, lots of pros show up for the annual Boozer Jam. You might even see Colby Raha, BMXer turned highly innovative freestyle motocross rider, there at a jam, on his BMX bike.
Ride like a girl? You WISH you could. Jesse Gregory lofts a one footed Hannah high up in 2019, at a jam at Sheep Hills. #steveemigphotos
Sheep Hills can now be found on Google Maps, and you can search for “Balboa Blvd. Costa Mesa,” which is where many people park now. There are still no restrooms at Sheep Hills (well, there are bushes). There’s no gift shop, no Sheep Hills Hilton with balconies overlooking the jumps, no restaurant called Spinner’s Dinners, and no weed shop called The Office. Those were all funny thoughts over the years. But there is a big sign now that says Sheep Hills, for your selfie, so you can push your BMX cred on Instagram, if you like. If you go there to visit and ride, don’t be afraid to grab a shovel and do a little trail maintenance, or help water the jumps, if asked to help by the current locals and builders.
This post is dedicated to the hardcore BMX jumpers, Mike “Boozer” Brown, Stephen Murray, and Bryant “Doc” Dubon. Mike Brown was a hardcore racer, SHL, and longtime builder at Sheep. He was paralyzed in 2011 in a race accident, and passed away from several related health issues in 2019. Stephen Murray was a top pro jumper, who was paralyzed from the neck down, in a jumping accident in 2009. He eventually moved back to the U.K.. Bryant “Doc” Dubon was a hardcore jumper, Freddy Chulo’s brother, and was tragically lost to Covid-19 early in the pandemic. Their spirit and influence lives on in the kids who ride Sheep Hills, and other jumps worldwide, every day.
There are no paid links in this post.
