10 years ago this week from Mark Whiteley

Mike Rusczyk — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 16:01:03 -0500

Ten years ago I went on a really epic two week trip to Alaska with Mark Whiteley, Joe Brook, and Slap Pals...

Photo By Mark Whiteley

When I was twenty two just newly skating for the company Foundation and living in Northern California Santa Rosa to be exact.
I got a call from Joe Brook at Slap Magazine asking me if I could get Foundation to buy me a plane ticket to Alaska, he was trying to put a skate trip together and wanted me to come along. I had been on plenty of skate trips with just my friends and had crossed the country several times by then but I had not been on any magazine trips.

So I told him fuck yeah I'll do it, an article in Slap and a trip to Alaska sounds like an awesome time. The trip was to be two weeks driving around Alaska in the summer with Jerry Hsu, Judd Hertzler, Tony Cox, Joe Brook, and Mark Whiteley, we were to try and fill ten pages if we could.

If I remember correctly this photo by Mark was shot when we got to the city of Fairbanks about a eight hour drive north of Anchorage.

We had just gone to a thrift store and bought a bunch of stupid shit, I was in my new coonskin cap eating a banana and Tony Cox has his aviator rig. We were all going nuts after being cooped up in a car for too long and Tony was launching into some crazy shit. Tony can be very flamboyant and theatrical at times, he was awesome to have around. The trip was epic, skateboarding being young, fucking around, and nature. It's insane when the distance mounts and the time changes, things lurch forward with out your permission and you don't realize how rad things can be at the time of their happening.

Thanks Mark for bringing this trap back up in my mind,

- Mike

Ofad photo of the moment

10 years ago this week from Mark Whiteley