As we all know Vancouver/ Whistler are the hose of the 2010 Winter Olympic games. In preparation for the extreme amount of people visiting whistler in February during the Olympic the Whistler Council decided to shut down the Indoor Creekside Skate Park.
Now the Creekside skate park is really the only place in Whistler where it’s free to do any Physical Activity’s (sports) after 4pm in the winter.
To us the skate community this make no scents. Whistler funded the skate park build a few years ago, but are now throwing away that money to save an additional 10 parking spaces for the Olympics. No one was to pleased to hear the news.
One of my good friends Brian Hockenstein was one of the guys who was in charge of building the creekside skate park so many years ago along with Lenny, so of course they where in charge of tearing it down to save a few parking spots. So when Brian and Lenny where looking for some help tearing it down I volunteered my time to help them out.
The first day of tear down we had a pretty big crew of people helping out.
The ramps where well build so they where a chore to take apart and you could tell everyone wanted to get the last skate in before we started taking the screws out of the mini bowl that was built there so many years ago.
The first section we started taking apart was the mini ramp beside the bowl. We first had to drill out all the screws then pry off the skate lite. Eventually when we had the skate lite off we found out that the base of the ramps where glued to the concrete floors with screws. Also bolting them to the concrete. Now this make it even harder to clean the place up for Whistler Council so they wouldn’t be mad and possibly still help the Whistler Skate Association in the Future.
What we basically had to do was disassemble the ramps and store them in a storage walk way between two sections of the under ground parking lot. After we disassembled the mini pipe we put all the scrap pieces into one big pile and dragged the big pieces into the storage hallways to hopefully use them again in the future.
It took a few days of destruction to tear down the whole skate park but once it was finished Whistler Blackcomb was happy with the job we did and we hope to get support from them in the future to build a new indoor skate park to help support physical activity in the off season and epically in the winter to provide an alternative to going out on the town and drinking away the nights.
