or skateboard playgrounds, as they
call them. His company used to be
called Fad-tastic, but it has since
renamed itself so that it may continue
its reign of construction terror that
includes kinked transitions, useless
configurations, dirt landings and
overall sketchiness. Other brilliant
designs include ten foot transition on
four foot high ramps, car-clearing
jump ramps and using kingpin-like
bolts to fasten down steel skating sur-
faces. The Boulder Skatepark barely
escaped his wrath, but Arvada,
Wheatridge, Golden and Cheyenne,
Mine Skatepark in Crested Butte,
Colorado is incredible.
"Are these people crazy?" Bailey won-
dered out loud.
Maybe so. You have to wonder how
Crested Butte can have a free, totally
unsupervised skatepark that features,
among other things, an eleven-foot-
deep pool while the kids of
Huntington Beach, California are rele-
gated to rolling across lumps that are
not allowed to exceed 18 inches in
height. Some questions are better just
not asked.
The park was built by veteran skater
The deep end is about ten or eleven feet
with real pool coping and tile and con-
sists of a round face wall that quickly
curves into two flat side walls. The deep
and shallow ends are joined by two
round mellow "ears." You can do fly-
outs from the spine into the ears, from
the ears into the spine, from the ears
into the deep end and vice versa. The
whole thing shoots you around and it's
easy to go really, really fast.
Enhancing the bowl is the overall
character of the place. Crested Butte is
a fairly isolated community because of
the surrounding treacherous moun-
Wyoming were nary so lucky. If you're
getting a skatepark in your town,
check closely to see who will be build-
ing it and start squawkin' if the
builder mentions anything about a
skateboard playground.
A BEAUT OF A PARK
It's funny that Orange County,
California probably has over ten thou-
sand skaters and has a tiny skatepark
that looks like it was built for midgets,
and Gunnison County, Colorado proba-
bly has a total population well under
ten thousand and has a skatepark that
rivals Burnside and Marseilles. The Big
88 THRASHES
Lenny Byrd and Burnside builder, Mark
"Red" Scott, among others, and was
the weekend camp-out destination for
many skaters from Boulder, San Diego
and elsewhere who had heard of its
majestic curves. Tommy Kay of "Keep
the damn raccoon out of my truck,
please," fame was there mixing it up
with a cast of youngsters and not-so-
youngsters. Zorlac vet Glen Charnoski
dismantled the place and Al Partanen
I was tops at mixing up the old and new
into a hearty salad of stoke.
If you can't tell from the photos, the
shallow end is a bowled-off spine, about
five or six feet deep with metal coping.
tain passes. The weather is crazy and
I can go from snowing to raining to
hailing to being warm and sunny in a
matter of an hour. Burnt hippies, dogs,
dirtballs, Tim the rollerskater, snow-
boarders, little kids, longboarders, girl
skaters and regular dudes all mingle
around the the bowl, which lies in the
shadows of majestic peaks and lush
green hill sides. It's a beautiful place to
ride skateboards.
Throughout our camp-out weekend,
the small street course turned into a
veritable workin' man's beer garden,
with Shaffer, Pabst Blue Ribbon and
Schlitz being the elixirs of choice. By
LEFT: In olden days a smith was someone who pounded hot metal into shape.
Caleb Moore demonstrates his forging skills on the Crested Butte anvil.
ABOVE Bailey rocks a noseblunt slide during a relaxed summertime session at Arvada skatepark.
Sunday, there must have been a thou-
sand beer cans and bottles clogging
the trash cans. The marshal came by
every now and then to make sure
everyone was wearing their pads and
helmets, and would stand for a few
minutes, his arms crossed over his
huge belly, looking stern. Other than
that, there was no sense of any kind of
law and order. It was kind of like being
at the Nude Bowl.
AL PARTANEN
Al took the train for two days from San
Diego to meet us in Colorado. He's the
former king of the Turf Skatepark in
Milwaukee-an old concrete park from
the 1970s that escaped the destruction
that got all the other parks by hiding
under the floor of a titty bar. Al showed
me his sponsor-me video once, and in
between 360° flips and handrail feeble
grinds, Al did a frontside blunt in the
Turf's capsule-a 15-foot-deep pool
with no flatbottom.
"When the hell did you do that?" I asked.
"Oh, 1989, 1990, sometime around
then, "Al answered.
Al's an all-around terror. After being
told by his sponsor that he couldn't
have an ad unless it was street skating,
Al replied, "OK, take me to the biggest
handrail you got."
A fifteen stair handrail with a drop on
one side got fifty-fiftied and Al got his
first Creature ad.
Al's bananas.
THE DUDES
Seeing that all the other folks in the
camping expedition had paired off in
cozy, tent-enclosed, boy-girl twosomes,
Bailey, Al and I, i.e. the unloved, united
in our ignorance of the weaker sex.
"Hey, we don't need no tents," I
announced, "We're dudes."
Dudes. We were the Dudes. The Dudes
would sleep outside, which all dudes
know is the proper place.
"Yeah, the Dudes went to Target and
hooked up a killer tarp," Al offered.
"That's right," Bailey added "Nothing
like sleepin' under the stars. That is, if
you're a Dude."
And we were. And there's nothin' like
waking up at four in the morning to dis-
cover that your Dude, tarp has done
nothing to keep off the rain, but
instead has acted as a flume to guide
the gallons of water from the torrential
rains directly down the center of your
sleeping bag. We woke up to find our
bags turned into near-frozen sponges
with us at the center. All except Al, who
woke to find his fitted sheet and Harley
Davidson blanket turned into a near-
frozen sponge.
"Dudes out! Dudes out!" I screamed.
We drove an hour on empty from the
campsite to Gunnison, Colorado, where
we checked into a Holiday Inn. In an
attempt to avoid hypothermia, Bailey
had stripped down to long underwear
bottoms and one sock, the perfect out-
fit to greet a couple of senior citizens