Just off Spyglass Drive in Tehachapi, Calif., a small city about a hundred miles north of Los Angeles, a hulking steel lattice rises in the middle of a dusty landscape. The girders hold up one end of a suspended wooden road that swoops up the hillside underneath it like a smooth, caramel-colored roller coaster. The other end lies some 500 feet away, its top nine stories above its lowest dip.
One afternoon in April 2012, several boys and a man climbed into a camouflage-patterned dune buggy and drove uphill to the ramp’s apex. There, the boys strapped on helmets and dressed themselves in kneepads, chest and spine protectors, hip pads, elbow pads and gloves. The oldest, a 13-year-old named Jett Eaton … More