Skate Nation

"I think this has been one of the best things to happen to this town," says Jackel, who's already working with Grindline on a 7,500-square-foot expansion.

Creating Carbondale's curved transitions called for a sculptor as much as it did a construction worker. After the dirt walls were repacked into a general outline and painstakingly blanketed with a web of rebar, the six-person crew employed the shotcrete system -- a highly specialized technique most often seen in swimming-pool construction -- to spray an extremely dense mix from a pressurized hose onto the vertical walls. Then, using trowels attached to long poles, the crew quickly cut and smoothed the fast-drying concrete with perfect accuracy: no lumps, no bulges, no seams.

One advantage to being the designers, the builders and the actual skateboarders is that they're able to make quick changes in the field. "You just can't design a perfect park on paper," Hubbard says. And there's no test or template that a normal concrete contractor can use to tell if a section has been poured the right way. Instead, with each scrape of the trowel, the skater/crew members think of their wheels rolling through a corner, their tails popping up an embankment -- or their faces skidding down it if a pyramid is designed too steeply.

Hubbard knows that Grindline skateparks are difficult. That's by design. Rather than building for the beginner kid still trying to ride down the driveway, he keeps the highest common denominator in mind: older, expert skaters. Like manifest destiny for skateboarders, he sees concrete monuments like Carbondale's studding the great bulge of America, a rolling network of gnarliness. He envisions skaters traveling from city to city, paying homage to the distinctive twists and turns of each skatepark. A "skate nation," built by skateboarders, for skateboarders.

But even Grindline has its detractors. Sean Robinson, co-owner of Denver's Emage Skateshop, has two primary criticisms of its skateparks: They're too extreme for the average skater and they don't include enough street elements.

For street skaters like Robinson, the park to hit is Fossil Creek in Fort Collins. The plaza of stairs and rails was much cheaper to build than the city's other, below-ground park. Tim Altic, who designed Fossil Creek as a consultant to a city-hired landscape-architecture firm, sees his role as interpreter between the skateboard world and the city. "It's not a matter of engineering; it's not a matter of architecture; you know, it doesn't even matter what rules the city has," he says. "Skating is skating, and there's the rule."

But landscape-architect groups that continue to get the country's biggest contracts often don't recognize the rule. "They don't know what they're doing," Altic says of the Architerra Group, which built the Denver Skatepark. "They're not skaters; they don't build good timing into their parks, the rhythm that you pump speed. They don't build that feeling into it, and that's why it's not so good."

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The principals of the Architerra Group, Dean Pearson and Mike Taylor, are seated at a long conference table in their Littleton office, a converted one-story house on a former ranch sandwiched between C-470 and the foothills. On the walls around them are colored sketches of soccer fields, streetscapes, bike paths and riverwalks; there are also posters detailing the Denver, Lakewood and Sheridan skateparks.

Pearson and Taylor met at MDG Inc., a local environmental-design firm, where they worked on the wonky Parker skatepark and then helped design the Thornton skatepark before forming their own outfit. Over the past five years, skateparks have accounted for about 25 percent of Architerra's business, says Pearson, who used to skateboard back in the '70s. Although he admits that he's not much of a skater these days, he says he makes an effort to ride every one of the parks his company's designed. But it's clear that he doesn't see Architerra as skaters designing skateparks; he views the company's role as more of a conduit for the community's wishes. "We're not interested in telling other people what they should be skating," Pearson says. "Skaters have the final say on how each feature should look and how tall it should be."

The process of building and managing these projects has become a hot-button issue for parks directors, according to Regan Dickenson, editor of Parks and Rec Business Magazine, which ran a ten-part series on the subject. "A lot of it had to do with the fact that they were getting user demand" -- and not only from skateboarders, he says. Alternative activities like BMX and trials mountain biking, in-line skating and even mountain boards and razor scooters are chipping away at the popularity of conventional, ball-oriented sports with young people.

"We have this book called Time-Saver Standards for Landscape Architecture," explains Joe Eads, senior landscape architect for the City of Arvada, which has earmarked $500,000 for two more concrete skateparks. "It says, you know, here's a baseball field and you've got 320-yard baselines, and this is five feet from that, etc., etc. Well, there's no Time-Saver Standards for skatepark design."