Boom and echo

This is the fourth dispatch in Sensuous Skateboarding, a series from Dirt x Simple Magic. Today, Cole Nowicki on the park where he learned to “drop in.”

Blue is not what you want. A clear blue sky means heat. Another afternoon of your summer spent suffering. If you’re lucky, stray whisps of clouds will meander across the sky into the sun’s path. Those brief moments of relief are when the skatepark in Lac La Biche, Alberta, becomes tolerable enough to use.

Devoid of shade and dotted with pre-fabricated metal ramps that become frying pan-hot from June through September, the hollow, booming structures that comprise this place echo across the rest of Dumasfield Park and into the surrounding neighbourhood if you so much as roll onto their surface. You’ll find similar facilities tucked into the corners of communities around the world. Products of an era where a marriage of  ignorance, convenience, and limited budgetary expenditure led to a surge of low-cost, low-quality skateparks that had innumerable municipal governments reddening their backs with self-congratulatory jobs well done.

The Lac La Biche skatepark—my hometown park—is emblematic of the trend. Its original iteration, installed some 25 years ago, held an obstacle one could aptly describe as Modern Tech Deck. A prohibitively steep and slender bank led to a tabletop that reached head height and was flanked by two rounded ledges that went across and down. Its far side was a three-flat-three stair set that was impossible to gather the required speed to attempt.

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