A flight of stairs

The El Toro 20 is named for its 20 concrete steps and for its home on the campus of the El Toro High School in Lake Forest, California. Over the past couple decades, this wide, steep monolith has witnessed some of the most beautifully senseless moments in BMX and skateboarding history. And on Monday, June 17th, it disappeared. A blurry distant image started circulating Instagram, shot by a heartbroken passerby, that showed through a web of caution tape, that in place of the once immortal El Toro 20 was now an empty sandy slope.

News of the death of El Toro overwhelmed action sports social media. It was no mystery what was going to happen next. Just as notorious as the feats that have taken place on the El Toro 20 are the run-ins with security guards, police and teachers. The spot's fame is no doubt a burden on the school, and it was only a matter of time before they would decide to make the stairs unrideable. That pile of dirt was a sign that it was about to happen. It was the end of an era. A loss. A tragedy. But not for everyone.

Dylan Stark is a pro BMXer who grew up in Lake Forest and attended El Toro High School. He's no stranger to the 20, but there's something that sets him apart from most of the athletes who have made El Toro their canvas. Dylan rides mountain bikes. He rides them really really well. In fact, he rode mountain bikes long before he became a BMX pro.

Stark spent his early teen years racing (and usually winning) a downhill series in not-so-nearby Fontana, which flourished during Snow Summit's mountain bike blackout. But at the same time, Stark's local dirt jumps were getting plowed, and pushing his 40-pound Chumba was getting tiresome. He switched to BMX when Lake Forest's Etnies skatepark started hosting bike nights, a rarity in the skateboard-dominated California park scene. But many years later, he would pick up his Chumba again, posting clips on Instagram, occasionally tagging them with #ineedanewbike. They must have been good because they caught the eye of Brandon Semenuk. Stark and Semenuk had never met before. They'd never spoken. But after a few exchanges, Semenuk offered Stark one of his mothballed Trek Sessions, and SRAM paid to ship it to him. That poor bike has been getting thrashed ever since. Stark's creative eye has put it through trials even Semenuk may not have imagined, including some on the El Toro 20. A recent edit closed with a crank slide down one of its intimidating handrails. Crank slides on enormous features like El Toro are deceptively difficult. And on a downhill bike, they're nearly unheard of. That's about when Stark connected two very distant dots.

Above and off to the side of the stairs is one of the school's buildings, and Stark toyed with the idea of dropping off its roof into the stairs. He even considered it on the day of the crank slide but he knew it would mean certain death. Then, on Monday, the images of the newly denuded transition reached his Instagram feed.

"It hit me like a brick. There's a dirt landing at El Toro now. I couldn't fall asleep last night. I couldn't stop thinking about it. I woke up this morning, just thinking in my head I've got to go do this. The stars are aligning right now."

I called up Dylan (forget this "Stark" nonsense) as soon as I saw this post. We ride and dig at the same jumps, and I've seen him do some incredible things in person. But nothing was like this. I wanted to congratulate him, but more than that, I wanted to know the story.

"In my 27 years of being alive, there's never been a chance to do that. I could have brought my own dirt or something, but that would have taken forever." Of course, I wouldn't have been surprised if he had. As El Toro alumni, you can imagine what pulling this off would mean. The stress that day must have been unbearable.

"When we got there, they were already installing the [new] steps. [] They were on lunch break, and I was like 'Can I jump this real quick?' And he said their boss comes back in fifteen minutes. 'Just go for it.' So I ran out to the car and started padding up, and all these construction workers were looking at me and making phone calls."

If you're not familiar, this is sometimes what happens when a professional skater or BMXer is lining something up. Nearly every clip has a story like this behind it, albeit usually not to this level. There are often authorities looking on. Sometimes they're complicit, sometimes loudly protesting, sometimes even standing in the way of the rider, always at the peril of each. It was quite a scene at El Toro High that day. "As soon as I got my pads on I went back in the school, and there were already ten people there who were just looking at the set, [] then they just came straight at me because I had the bike and were like 'You’ve got to leave too.'" Dylan and company retreated, as it happens, to a nearby set of dirt jumps to weigh their options and strategize. They decided not to accept defeat, and they simply went back. But first, in what must have been the most surreal Wal-Mart shopping experience of Dylan's life, he stopped by to get a helmet mount for his GoPro.

"When we went back, there was a flag dance team practicing under the big awning I had to climb up, and the construction workers had already built four more stair braces. I was like, 'I have to gap even further out now.' I had to climb up a tree, and I pulled my bike up with a rope. I’m looking at the spot, and I’m like 'There’s no f***ing way I could hit this.' because the tree was there and there was this beam that came out [from beneath the roof] and now the steps were there, and I was like, 'Yo, can you guys just rip the stairs out?'"  You can make your own judgement at this point. Hours of work had been put in to building a framework for the new stairs. And a handful of spectators dutifully tore it out in seconds. But I think the world is richer for what happened next, so let's just move on. 

"I thought it was gravel up top, but it was flat. I’d never been up there. And then, it was all smooth and there was a 5-inch lip around the whole thing I had to bunny hop. I don’t know where I’m going, so I put a couple skid marks like run ups, trying to direct me where I’ve got to go. I was like, 'Well as long as I’ve got a clear path through this tree and don’t hit this beam, I’ll catch tranny hopefully.'"

And in a matter of minutes, it was over. He cleared a path through the tree, didn't hit that beam, and caught tranny. "I was in shock, like no f***ing way. And just so happy, and everybody lost their mind and everybody was cheering. It was the craziest sickest feeling because I was having the worst anxiety all day. It’s like the feeling that you’re going to ride a contest [multiplied by] 100 ‘cause you know the only day to hit the spot is today and you only have one go and you could go to jail or whatever. And yesterday, I was icing my knee because I could barely walk and I had a mashed knuckle, I could barely hold onto the handlebar. I was like, 'I have to send it no matter what.'"

On its own, this is not the most incredible feat our sport has ever witnessed. We didn't give Aaron Gwin's win on that wet day on Mont-Sainte-Anne in 2017 a 1400-word backstory. Same with Matt Hunter's ridiculous gap-to-wallride on the cover of our 2010 photo annual, or any one of Brandon Semenuk's winning Joyride runs. But none of them were on hand-me-down bikes. None were truly once-in-a-lifetime opportunities. And none of those riders were (or possibly still are) going to get arrested for what they did. That piece of dirt on that California high school campus only existed for a couple dozen hours. And it only existed because there is an effort to return a set of stairs from a place of self-expression to an object of simple utility. Someone took the impossibly narrow opportunity to mark that event with triumph, and I'd be hard-pressed to think of many moments that can top that.