Well, I said our next post would be about the climbing side of our blog but I lied. We knocked off 4 new skateparks from our list this past weekend so I figured we'd write about that. I picked up the kids after school on Friday and we headed to Sultan. To get to Sultan, you have to go through Monroe and the traffic was TERRIBLE!! I know it was a Friday but every time I go through there I end up fighting the urge to pull the rest of my hair out. The S.P. was your typical small town set up. Concrete slab with Concrete brand ramps. The bright spot was that they had a quarter pipe that was split in the middle and angled away from each other about 5 degrees so Chase was getting some good airs. We then went to Woodinville S.P. which we have been to many, many times. There were a couple of guys who had their boards strapped to their feet and were flying around the park. Crazy. The kids ripped it up pretty good. On Saturday, we headed to Tacoma and stopped first at the S.P. at Norpoint. Easily the worst skatepark we've been to and a complete waste of concrete. I think it's pretty old but they really should tear it down. It had a shallow (really long) quarter pipe opposite a steep spine ramp that had the worst transition to it. The worst part is that the other side of the spine was just 20 feet of concrete and then gravel so you'd have to jump off the board at a high rate of speed. I took some quick pictures and a couple minutes of video and we were out of there. We then hit McKinley park which is a stones' throw from the Tacoma Dome. The park is newly remodeled and they added a skate plaza. The plaza was lame and kind of dangerous. Why design something where you get speed and then put a foot high curb right in front of it?! We weren't too happy at that point. Then we hopped in the car and went to check out the rest of the park because I thought they were going to put some boulders on the other end. Well, no boulders but up the path from the plaza was a cool run with a hump into a 5 foot quarter pipe. The kids really liked it and they spent a good hour just taking turns with some locals on it. The only bad thing is that they didn't use coping on the quarter pipe so it is already chipped badly and is only going to get worse. When I could finally pull them away from that, we headed to Lakewood and the S.P. at Harry Todd Park. This was you typical S.P. in the tennis court setup. We didn't spend a lot of time there. Pretty much got our footage and headed out to Sprinker. We had only been to Sprinker once before and Chase was especially excited about ripping it up there. As usual, the kids impressed all the locals. Sidney got 3 or 4 requests to drop into the deep 10 foot bowls there and Chase was launching out of this shallow quarter pipe, over the 3 foot wide landing, onto the flat 2 feet below, while doing a 180. He landed it all 5 times he tried it and they were all really clean. It was sweet. On Sunday, the kids skated for 2 1/2 hours at Lower Woodland in Seattle. The kids have skated there a lot and it's technically still on our list because I haven't taken any footage because it's always so crowded. Since we live in Seattle I am patiently waiting for the right time. So, we hit 7 parks this last weekend with 4 of them new ones for our list. If you can believe it, they also climbed at Redmond Vertical World twice. Sidney made this V6- that she was projing (working on) so she was a happy camper.
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