Escape Country — The Trabuco Canyon Park With One of BMX's First Tracks

Legend Bike Co · BMX heritage series

In June 1973, the first issue of the first BMX magazine ever printed listed the tracks a kid could actually go race. There were four of them. Four, in the entire world, as far as the sport's own press was concerned.

Palms Park. B.U.M.S. Dominguez Park. And Escape Country.

The first three are names that get repeated in every history of the sport. The fourth is a canyon in Orange County that most people have never heard of, on land that is now covered in houses. This is the chapter for it.

What it was: a privately run outdoor recreation park with a BMX track on it

Where: Trabuco Canyon, Orange County, California, at the eastern end of what is now Rancho Santa Margarita

Operator: Jim Robinson

BMX on record: running by 1972 per Scot Breithaupt; listed as one of four official tracks in Bicycle Motocross magazine, June 1973

Also on the property: motorcycle motocross, off-road riding, hang gliding, skydiving, fishing, camping, live music

Sanction: not established — see below

The site today: the Robinson Ranch and Dove Canyon residential developments

A park first, a BMX track second

Escape Country was not a BMX facility that happened to have some other things going on. It was the other way around. It was a large private recreation park in the canyon, and BMX was one of the things you could do there.

What people who were there remember is the sheer range of it. Motorcycle motocross was the main draw. There was off-road riding, a pond, fishing, camping, live bands on Sunday afternoons. There was hang gliding off the ridge, and the park was involved in designing and promoting an early world hang gliding competition. Families drove out on the weekend, parked a trailer, and stayed. More than one person who raced there describes the same routine: camp all weekend, flag on Saturday, race on Sunday.

That matters for understanding what BMX was in 1972 and 1973. The sport had no buildings of its own. It borrowed. It set up on the edge of motorcycle parks, in city parks, on vacant lots, wherever somebody with dirt would tolerate a few hundred kids on twenty-inch bikes. Escape Country is a clean example of the arrangement that got the sport off the ground: a motorcycle park owner who said yes.

The claim, and what actually backs it up

The strongest evidence is the magazine. Bicycle Motocross magazine — the first BMX publication there ever was — came out of Orange, California in June 1973, published and edited by Elaine Holt. Its first issue carried an interview with Scot Breithaupt, a test of the Yamaha moto-bike, and an official list of four tracks: Palms Park, Escape Country, B.U.M.S. and Dominguez Park.

Being one of four names on that list is about as good as a founding credential gets in this sport.

The second piece of evidence goes back further, and it comes from as close to the source as anyone can get. Scot Breithaupt — who started the B.U.M.S. track in Long Beach in 1970 and is as responsible as any one person for BMX existing — wrote out his own corrections to the published history in 2001. Listing the tracks that were already running in 1972, he named them: Escape Country, Malibu, Saddleback, Soledad Sands, Fountain Valley, La Palma, Dominguez, Merritt College up north, Yarnell, and B.U.M.S. I and II.

Escape Country is first on his list.

That is worth pausing on, because for years the Escape Country question was treated as unresolved. A BMX researcher posting on an Orange County history site in 2009 said he had talked to riders who swore they raced Escape in 1972, but that none of them could produce a dated photograph, a clipping, or a trophy to prove it. He could only confirm 1973. Breithaupt's own 1972 list, written down years earlier in a different corner of the internet, is the corroboration that discussion was missing.

The track itself

Here the record thins out fast, and we are not going to dress it up.

The BMX track opened on one part of the property and, roughly a year later, was moved to a downhill location. That is the account of the researcher who worked the question hardest, and it fits the terrain — this was canyon country, hillsides and off-camber ground and steep drops, not a flat field somebody graded.

A downhill track in 1973 or 1974 puts Escape Country in a specific and short-lived category. Ernie Alexander had opened Soledad Sands as what is generally called the first gnarly downhill track in BMX, and the early sport had a real appetite for gravity before starting-hill-and-berm layouts standardized. Escape Country belongs in that conversation.

Beyond that — the length, the layout, the number of turns, whether it had a gate or a rubber band start — nothing has surfaced.

Who raced there

No BMX results sheet from Escape Country has survived anywhere we can reach, and we are not going to fill that hole with names.

What does survive is better than a results sheet in one respect. A woman who raced there as a girl in the 1970s has put on the record that she and her stepsister were among the first girls racing BMX at the park, and that she still has around ten trophies from the powder puff division. A girls' class, running at one of the four tracks the sport's own magazine recognized, in the first years BMX existed. That is a real piece of early women's BMX history sitting in somebody's garage in Orange County, and it deserves to be written down.

The park's regulars also remember Escape Country as a starting point for a run of riders who went on to serious motorcycle motocross careers. Those recollections are about motorcycles, not bicycles, and the two sides of the park shared ground and crowds without being the same thing, so we are leaving those names in the motocross column where the people who wrote them down put them.

How it ended

Escape Country did not survive its own real estate. Trabuco Canyon in the early 1970s was cheap open ground at the far edge of Orange County. Within a decade it was some of the most valuable dirt in Southern California, and the park is gone underneath the Robinson Ranch and Dove Canyon developments. Riders who go back now describe parking in a neighborhood, walking down a trail, and standing on the back side of the old riding area looking at what is left of the trails down to the pond.

The closing date is not settled. A man who was hired by Jim Robinson to announce a motocross race in 1972, and stayed on staff, has said plainly that the park closed in 1976. Other riders describe camping and racing there in 1977. Both accounts come from people who were there. We report the disagreement rather than pick a winner.

It is the same ending as most of the tracks in this series. Not a scandal, not a collapse. Just land that got too valuable to leave as dirt.

Where the record runs thin

  • The sanction. Nothing reached for this page names a sanctioning body for BMX racing at Escape Country. The NBA, the first BMX sanction in the United States, was not founded until 1973, so a track running in 1972 necessarily predates it. Breithaupt has argued that B.U.M.S. was effectively the first sanctioning body from 1971. Whether Escape Country ever ran under any of them, or stayed independent, is unresolved.
  • The exact opening date for BMX. Breithaupt places it among tracks running in 1972. The magazine listing confirms it by June 1973. Nobody has produced a dated photograph, program or trophy from 1971 or 1972, which is exactly what researchers have been asking for since at least 2009.
  • The closing date. A former staff member says 1976. Riders say they raced there into 1977. Unresolved.
  • Track details. The original layout, the downhill layout, the surface, the start method and the track's dimensions are all undocumented.
  • Riders and results. No BMX main event result, class winner or number-plate holder from Escape Country has been found in any archive reached here.
  • Jim Robinson. He is named as the man who ran the park, and the development on the site carries his name, but we have no verified biography, no dates and no account of what he did before or after. His status, living or otherwise, is not on any record we found, and we make no claim about it.
  • What came after. Racing continued in Trabuco Canyon after Escape Country — a motocross operation called Racing World held its first race there in April 1978, and riders recall a grass-track national in the canyon around 1981. Whether those events ran on literally the same ground as Escape Country, or on adjacent land, is not confirmed here.
  • Sources we could not reach. bmxsociety.com was unreachable throughout this research and bmxmuseum.com blocks the access methods available here. Period issues of Bicycle Motocross magazine and Bicycle Motocross News from 1973 to 1975 would settle most of the questions above; they exist in archive scans we were not able to open directly for this page.

Timeline

  • 1969 Ron Mackler helps organize the first registered BMX race at Palms Park in Santa Monica.
  • 1970 A 13-year-old Scot Breithaupt runs his first race at what becomes the B.U.M.S. track in Long Beach.
  • 1972 Escape Country is among the tracks already running, per Breithaupt's own account. Jim Robinson hires an announcer for a motocross race at the park.
  • June 1973 The first issue of Bicycle Motocross magazine is published in Orange, California by Elaine Holt, listing four official tracks: Palms Park, Escape Country, B.U.M.S. and Dominguez Park.
  • 1973 Ernie Alexander founds the NBA, the first BMX sanctioning body in the United States. Escape Country's affiliation, if any, is unknown.
  • c. 1974 The BMX track is moved to a downhill location on the property.
  • 1973–1977 Riders describe camping the weekend, flagging Saturday and racing Sunday. A powder puff girls' division runs at the park.
  • 1976 A former staff member dates the park's closing to this year. Other riders recall racing there into 1977.
  • 1978 Motocross racing returns to Trabuco Canyon under the Racing World name.
  • Today The site is covered by the Robinson Ranch and Dove Canyon developments.

Sources

University of BMX, "History of BMX (1968–1974)," compiled by Gerrit Does — the spine of this page. It is the source for the June 1973 first issue of Bicycle Motocross magazine, published in Orange, California by editor and publisher Elaine Holt, and for that issue's official listing of exactly four tracks: Palms Park, Escape Country, B.U.M.S. and Dominguez Park. The same page carries Scot Breithaupt's own written corrections to the history, sent to Gerrit Does in 2001, in which Breithaupt lists Escape Country first among the tracks already running in 1972. It is also the source for the 1969 Palms Park and 1970 B.U.M.S. dates, Ernie Alexander's founding of the NBA in 1973, Soledad Sands as the first downhill track in BMX, and Breithaupt's claim that B.U.M.S. functioned as the first sanctioning body from 1971. Orange County Memories, octhen.com — "Escape Country, Robinson Ranch" and "BMX Tracks at Saddleback Park & Escape Country," together with their reader comment threads, which are the source for Jim Robinson operating the park, the former announcer hired by Robinson in 1972 who dates the closing to 1976, the range of activities on the property, the powder puff girls' division and the surviving trophies, the weekend camping and Saturday flagging routine, the 1973 opening and roughly one-year move of the BMX track to a downhill location as researched by BMX historian Erick, his statement that no dated proof of 1971 or 1972 racing had been produced, and the present-day condition of the site. These are firsthand recollections posted to a public history blog and are cited as recollection, not as documentation. Racer X Online, Racing World track entry — motocross racing in Trabuco Canyon from April 1978. Contemporary reporting places the park at the eastern end of Rancho Santa Margarita, on the land now occupied by the Robinson Ranch and Dove Canyon developments. bmxsociety.com was unreachable throughout this research and bmxmuseum.com blocks server-side access; neither is cited, and both are flagged as open follow-ups.

If you were there

If you raced BMX at Escape Country, we want to hear from you — and if you have a dated trophy, a race program, a number plate or a photograph with a year on the back, you are holding something the record has been asking for since at least 2009. A single dated 1972 item from that track would settle a question about the founding years of this sport. It would also finally put a name or two into the rider section above.

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