Interview | Erick Winkowski

How are things going Erick? How long were you down in Mexico for?

Just a few days.

Sounds like a pretty easy trip for you, being from San Diego. Have you been going there most of your life?

Yeah, basically. Ever since I started skating, I’ve been going to Tijuana and Ensenada.

Do you know your way around pretty well now, or do you still have people to show you around?

We’re usually in a car with a group of friends. I have homies from Ensenada who live here now so when we go, we all pile into one car and just hit spot after spot. Since they're from there, they know the area, which makes things easy.

Ever run into any sketchy situations crossing the border or moving around down there?

Not really. Street skating there is different, though - especially at schools. Here, if you get caught skating a school, the cops usually just tell you to leave. Down there, we’ve been put in cuffs before. We didn’t get arrested, but they made a big deal out of it. They see it more seriously - like you’re an adult somewhere kids are supposed to be, not just skating a spot you’re not supposed to be at.

But street spots are cool. There are lots of random places to skate. In Rosarito, there’s a business plaza that’s basically a skatepark. They don’t mind you skating there - you just pay the guy watching the place 20 bucks and you can skate all day, film whatever you want and you get the whole plaza to yourself.

What a concept. Imagine if companies in the US did that instead of wasting their money on skate stoppers…

They’d definitely be making good money. So yeah, we just do that. Some spots are a little sketchy, but we don’t really bring weed down there or anything. We know it’s different.

Everything’s a bit more serious. We leave the weed at home, avoid most schools, and just skate the spots that feel right. If you’re skating in front of someone’s house and they come out looking pissed, you just apologize and leave. But sometimes they come out stoked, you know?

I feel like that applies to traveling anywhere, especially when it comes to places like Asia and whatnot.

Exactly. There are places I won’t bring it but honestly, I’ve brought weed almost everywhere - except Mexico and Japan. Everywhere else, I’ve usually got a fat sack with me.

Are you able to speak Spanish if things ever went sideways and you had to explain your way out of it?

I can understand it better than I can speak it. When people talk really fast, I catch enough to get the gist. If they speak slowly, I can usually piece it together. But it takes me a few days to adjust. After being in Mexico for a while, my ear adapts, and I start understanding and speaking it more. But when I’ve been home for a while, I lose that again. Every time I go back, it takes about five days to fully get back into it.

That’s what people always say about learning a language - it’s all about immersing yourself in the culture and going into situations where you’re forced to use it.

It’s actually kind of fun. Even when I don’t understand everything, I’ve got friends who tell people I do, so they just start talking to me in Spanish. I’m like, “well, I guess I better figure out what they’re saying,” since now they think I get it.

I kind of understand it, but not fully. I’ll never say I speak Spanish until I’m fluent, and I’m definitely not there yet.

That just means you’ve gotta keep going back down there!

Speaking of traveling, I was told by friend of the mag, Nick Hanson, to ask you about getting lost in the woods at Mount Shasta. What’s the story there?

Oh yeah, that was pretty wild. It was just one of those funny, kinda crazy things. It happened after everyone at the camp had gone to sleep. A few of us were still up - we’d been eating mushrooms all day, just kind of kept it going. I remember being with Henry [Gartland] when everyone else had gone back to the market to get food. They left us in charge of the camp gear, which is funny because we were probably the highest of the group.

So they left the least responsible people in charge…

Exactly. We couldn’t even go into a store, so we stayed. But to be fair, Henry’s actually really responsible. I tried to get him to leave the stuff a few times, but he wasn’t having it. He was locked in. We were standing there watching our gear, and I remember this guy with a giant axe just walking right past us. We were like, “Where the hell are we?” There were tweakers everywhere - like eight different campsites around us, and they all seemed to know each other. These dudes looked like they never shaved or took a bath. Super sketchy vibes. No service, just surrounded by trees and mountains.

I somehow wandered away and found a river nearby. I was fascinated with this river because I was really starting to peak and get some good visuals. I had rolled this huge blunt and I always like to smoke when I hit that peak. But as I was smoking, I started feeling guilty because I knew Henry would’ve loved it too. So I went back up to camp and tried to get him to come see it.

He still wasn’t budging?

Nope. Still guarding the stuff. He was like, “you just told me to watch it.” So I went back to the river, smoked a bit more, got caught up in it again, then went back and tried again. He wasn’t moving, so I stayed by the water. 

There were these logs going over the river - it was weird. Like, there wasn’t just one river, there were three or four. You’d cross one on a log, then there’d be another, then another. It was nighttime by this point, and I remember it was me, Henry, Nick and Jereme [Knibbs] started walking to get to a clearing so we could look at the stars. We were all tripping and just wanted to stare at the sky for a while. We crossed the rivers, found an open spot  and it was beautiful. But after a while, we decided to head back and that’s when we realized we were lost. We couldn’t find where we had crossed.

The river was running pretty strong, so we couldn’t just wade through it. We kept walking, trying different directions, but we kept ending up in the same spot. It was like we were going in circles. Eventually, we built a fire on the rocks near the riverbank so we’d have a landmark - some way to mark where we’d already been so we didn’t keep looping back.

It’s like leaving yourself a bread crumb trail…

Exactly. We were making little fires to track where we’d been, but it didn’t help much- we were still completely lost. Then we heard this drum circle going off across the river, back in the camp. It was all the tweakers, just going wild.

They were having this intense drum circle and we could hear it clearly, but we had no idea how to get back there. Eventually, we gave up. We were like, “screw it, we’ll sleep here.” I had a Carhartt jacket, so I figured I’d be fine on the rocks. We all started finding little spots to sleep. 

Then I remembered I randomly had a firework in my pocket so, right before we were about to knock out, I was like, “just in case there’s a bear or something out here, I’m lighting this off.” It was just a single shot.

A warning shot.

Exactly. So I lit it up and it echoed through the whole mountain range. It was way louder than I expected. The drum circle completely stopped and all these guys start yelling -  thinking it was a gunshot or something.

Uh oh…

Lights started turning on all over camp, and then we saw them - just a bunch of tweakers with flashlights coming toward us, crossing the river. There was a whole group of them charging in our direction and I was still so high. I turned to Jereme and said, “yo, we’re in the middle of nowhere - anything goes out here.” I was like, “If they get to us, I’m smashing someone with a rock.”

I picked up two big rocks, one in each hand. Jeremy looked at me super serious, xthen he looked down on the floor and picked up a couple rocks of his own. We spread out a little, each of us close by but posted up in different spots - just waiting.

Luckily, they never made it all the way to us. They stopped somewhere along the trail, yelled some more, then turned around and went back to camp. But because of that, we could see the direction they came from and we realized it was the way back.

Thank god there’s a silver lining!

Yeah, weirdly enough. Once they were gone, we followed the path they had taken and that’s how we made it back to camp. It was just such a crazy setting for all that to happen - no service, deep in the woods, surrounded by people you don’t know. You don’t know what anyone’s capable of out there.

I guess not of that made it into the Santa Cruz edit from that trip… 

Speaking of which, your pro board is one of the more unique ones out there on that old school 80’s shape. Are you still rocking that setup or are there any changes you’re gonna make to that shape? 

I’ve actually got a new shape coming out pretty soon. It’s similar to the one I have now, but with a bit more of a nose. Just enough extra room to make tricks like ollies a little easier.

Just to have something a little bit more for your foot to catch to I assume?

Yeah, but pretty much the same shape.

Did it feel natural for you to start skating flat-concave decks like that, or was there a learning curve as you transitioned from skating regular double kick decks? 

I started on normal popsicle boards and skated a ton of street when I first got into it. I was watching videos like Circa ‘it’s Time’, Zero ‘New Blood”, Baker ‘3’ and that kind of stuff so I was jumping off stairs, hitting rails and just going for it. But after a while, I was like, “man, this shit hurts.”

Eventually, I started seeing people flying around in bowls - guys like Nolan Johnson and a few others. At first I was like, “There’s no way I’ll ever be able to skate like that or do airs like that.” It felt kinda discouraging, honestly - I was super bad at it in the beginning. But then I got obsessed with it. I stopped caring how good or bad I was - I just wanted to do it. Then my friend, Glenn Garcia, started showing me all these old videos from the '80s.

I had no idea that type of skating even existed, so now I was watching actual hand plants and seeing how things were done back then. I started digging into old contest footage. I’d watch Lance Mountain, Neil Blender, Jeff Phillips do their runs and that kind of skating got me so hyped. 

Then I started riding for Welcome, which was the first company I skated for. That’s when I really started skating different shapes. I moved off the popsicle and onto these more shaped boards and I realized I could still do everything I wanted to do on a popsicle, but with a little shape to it.

All my homies at the time were helping design the shapes and the artwork. I wasn't the main skater or anything, but I was part of the crew. But over time, the owner - Jason - started stressing me the fuck out to the point where it just wasn’t fun anymore. He’d say stuff like, “I’ll hook you up with this” or “I’ll help you out with that,” but then it wouldn’t really happen. I told him I was planning to move to Seattle, and he said he’d help out with $100 a month for food and stuff. But after I got there, he just laughed at me and told me to get a job. 

I mean, I did end up getting a job - but still, I was like, “damn, that’s pretty fucked up.” Telling someone you’ll help them out, then turning around and laughing at them like that…

Were you living at Dope Planet at that point, or was that later?

Nah, that place didn’t exist yet. We were all living at this house right next to Garfield. It had a nice ramp out back, a pretty sick setup overall. Then the ramp got moved a couple times. It started off at like eight feet tall, but the city made us chop it down 'cause it was too big.

Eventually we left the ramp behind, and around that time, I quit Welcome.

Sounds like there was no love lost.

Exactly. That was actually the first time I ever did mushrooms too, up in Seattle. I had this realization like, “yo, this dude adds so much unnecessary stress to my life. If I just told him I didn’t want to skate for his company anymore, I’d feel way better mentally.” I sat with that for a bit and then called him up and said, “I’m done. I don’t want to do this anymore.”

He tried really hard to convince me to stay. He was calling, saying, “No, we need to talk about this.” But I already had my mind made up. I wasn’t interested in talking it through - I was over it.

What was your next deck after that?

Underneath the ramp, there was this old ass 80’s [John] Lucero board - the one with the little jester graphic in the cage. It was missing the top ply but I took it out, set it up, snapped a photo and sent it to him like, “I’m good, dude. Don’t need your boards.”

Case closed. 

Yeah, I was done. But then I started skating that Lucero board and was like, “this thing is dope.” The shape, the feel - it was so sick just doing a slash or a little frontside ollie. Eventually it snapped on me dropping in on the Garfield wall. After that, I was dishwashing at the time, so I saved up and bought a Ray Barbee Powell board. That’s what I skated when we packed up the house and literally skated from Seattle to Mexico.

That whole“Great Skate” mission you guys did sounded insane.

Yeah, that’s how I got used to skating those shaped boards. I did like 2,500 miles on that Ray Barbee deck. After that, I was like, “I’m never going back to popsicles.” That shape just felt right.

It was practically glued to your feet at that point! 

Also it makes a lot of sense that you were rolling around with that Seattle crew. We interviewed Simon Bannerot for our last issue and he was going on about how Turtle Tom and those Dope Planet taught him how to do eggplants + how to stay low and go fast. 

For sure. I was lucky to be there in the early stages of that whole scene. There’ve been a lot of different versions of the crew and where the ramp ended up over the years. Back then, it was super tight. It’s still sick now - but these days, I never know who’s living at that house. Every time I show up, it’s all love, but half the time I’m like, “who are all these new faces?”

Back in the day, every face was familiar. Most of those homies are all spread out now but when you do catch all those guys in one spot, it’s the place to be.

Would you ever want to move back into a skate house like that?

Man, living there was some of the funnest times of my life so it’d be dope but but it’d also be different now. I never even had my own room until everything started to fall apart and people started to go their separate ways. I still saw my homies from the original house, and in the beginning, it was so goddamn fun but all I had was the couch.

The thing I like about my life now, as opposed to then, is that I have more space. I have a garden and shit now and that’s where I spend most of my time now, so it’s pretty fucking tight.

Also, I have a dog now, and that’s changed my life a lot. Back then, I didn’t have anything to take care of. Honestly, I didn’t really care about myself very much and didn’t treat myself the best. It’s easy for me to get that way. But having a dog makes me realize, before I ever let myself go like that, that there’s something that relies on me and depends on me.

It keeps me in check. Her little face pops up in my head and I’m like, “She needs you, so don’t be acting a fool” and sometimes that thought saves me. Back then, I didn’t have that. I was just like, “fuck it.” And that was kind of dangerous. Now I look back and I’m like, “damn dude, how am I alive?”

It seems like that’s the whole point of growing up and gaining life experience. You build things and make them your own to fill your life with some sort of purpose.

Yeah, I have my own goals now. It’s kind of similar to what it used to be because, like I said, those were some of the best times of my life, and I know that that fun exists. I just have to build that myself now.

Max Hohlbein created that for everybody in Seattle. Nobody else did that. That was Max’s shit and he made it so that the whole scene in Seattle - anybody who skated knew, “This is what we do,” and they were welcome to come ride the ramp, be a part of it. It’s pretty fucking cool to give everybody a place like that. He just trusts everyone. There was always a new obstacle and it was just fucking sick.

He sounds like the type of guy who isn’t looking for any credit or recognition either - he just did it for the love.

It’s just who he is. He just wakes up and he’s gotta get after it. And I feel like I’ve got that same little bit of drive in me too. It was really fun to be a part of that, but at a certain point I had to start trying to create my own little paradise down here.

I live way down in south San Diego. Not Vista. Not Oceanside. Not where everybody goes and skates. Down here there’s not too much. We have a few skateparks, but there’s no local ramp and no warehouse you can just pull up to.

I’m trying to work on getting that. Hopefully someday I’ll find a spot nearby and build a little fucking wasteland in the backyard where all the homies will have their keys and everybody can just come and skate. I wanna create a spot for the homies down here who need a place to go, even if it’s just for a few people. 

Because I was one of those people up in Seattle who got blessed with a spot. That ramp and and other spots like Monk’s Ramp were a paradise. I could go sit down, eat some food, put music on, drop in and skate in this little place that felt like a bamboo forest. You could pretend you were anywhere in the world under there. That meant a lot to me.

Every day before I went to go dishwash, I’d go skate his ramp, and then I’d go to work. That was the bit of skating I got to do every day. If I could build something like that down here  -  even just for one of the homies, who's about to go to work, to pull up and get theirs in before their shift - that would be sick as fuck. Just to know it’s getting used and that it means something to someone.

You know what they say: “if you build it, they will come.”

If I didn’t have skating, I for sure would be in some trouble. And that’s how I see it too - I wanna try and help other people have more outlets. More places to go. Even if they just want to come kick it in the backyard and watch the homies skate - we’ll have a fucking a barbecue. It’s the same way Milton does it. Milton’s got a ramp in his backyard, has barbecues and all the homies just come kick it. That’s the dream. That’s the life right there.

Photos: Eric Palozzolo

Originally published in Issue 6 - July 2025