THE New England missionaries who began arriving in Hawaii in 1820 were horrified to find, as they sailed in, people surfing. “Some of our number, with gushing tears, turned away from the spectacle,” wrote Hiram Bingham, the missionaries’ leader. This devastating display of half-nude “barbarism” — really, it was the ancient practice of he’e nalu, which was rich in traditional religious meaning — clearly had to be stamped out. Twenty-seven years later, with Hawaiian culture being destroyed by changes that the missionaries helped set in motion, Bingham wrote with satisfaction of the “decline and discontinuance of the surfboard.”
Of course, surfing was never fully extinguished. A handful of Hawaiians, notably Duke Kahanamoku … More
Donner Pass is known as the treacherous path westward in which travelers in the mid-1800s resulted to cannibalism to survive the harsh conditions. Yes…they ate each other to stay alive. Fast forward to modern time 200+ years later, and the picturesque 2.4 mile highway has caught the eye of some of the world’s top downhill skateboarders. With it’s elevation change of over 2,000 feet, aggressive corners and possible top speeds of up to 45 mph, the Sector 9 team took advantage of the closed road to explore the dangers that lurk at every corner. Watch Louis Pilloni, A.J. Haiby, Jimmy Riha, Micah Green, and Jackson Shapiera rip down one of the coolest stretches of road on the planet.