Joe Severson - kickflip Chris Teigen - smith grind

Minnesota winters are tough. It's not exactly the most friendly place for skateboarders to live. But we now have multiple indoor parks and can actually choose where we want to skate in January. I had heard about the new park in Plymouth for the last year or so and finally got to visit last week. It's a fairly short drive from the cities and not hard to find. It's called 'Ride XP' I think. Or maybe 'Ride - Extreme Sports Park'. Something Extreme like that. It's an impressive facility that is now the largest indoor park in Minnesota. Everything is shiny and new. New ramps, new fence, new counters, new climbing pole, new go-carts (they have electric go-carts you can drive), and even new disco balls dangling from the ceiling in the break room. I recognize the dude working the desk as a local and was happy to see skaters working there.

The park was built by 'True Ride' and is as solid as they come. I'm usually bummed on True Ride in the sense that I don't like cookie cutter skateparks but I have to say that for the most part they did a nice job here. The street course is, well, a street course. Lots of rails, banks and the like. They have a perfect spine that was about 20 feet wide and 5 or so feet tall and a crazy shaped bowl. I saw the diagram for the bowl and it looked sick but when I saw it live I was surprised to see how small it was. It's probably six feet deep but everything is really tight, the corners are all goofy and it's pretty difficult to skate. If I were walking in the woods and came across it I'd think it was rad but to actually build something like that is a waste of money. No two walls face each other and in some spots there's no flat at all. That said, it was really well built. There were beams in the warehouse so maybe they were trying to fit it around them. I'm not sure but I felt like I was drunk when I skated it cuz I never knew where I was.

Jesse Stanton - pop shoveit

It was a fairly slow day at the park but I watched the skaters on the street course and there seemed to be a good flow to the layout. And again I'm amazed at the shit skaters actually ride compared to what the designers had in mind. There's a starting platform by the bowl that was used mostly for launching out of instead of rolling down, there's a mini ramp built into the deck that was used as a ledge to kickflip down, black is white and all that. I love that kind of stuff. Build a vert ramp and most kids will want to ollie off the platform six inches to the ground. But the spine ramp was my favorite. It reminded me of the old Oasis days. There's an extension on one side so you can get an extra boost over to the other side. The coping was nice and everything in the whole park is surfaced with skatelite.

So I packed up my stuff and headed out to my car in the freezing month of January only to see something deeply disturbing. Sitting in front of this skatepark was a black 2003 Hummer H2 with a license plate that said 'RIDE XP'. What the fuck is that? A vanity plate on a Hummer? Isn't that a little redundant? Is that where these skaters money is going? If so that's a shame. Skating may be popular but if anyone should reap the benefits it should be skaters. Tony Hawk makes 10 million a year? Good for him. He's earned it. Our industry is unique in the sense that we try and keep things skater owned to support ourselves and our culture. We all give up a lot of our time, energy, bodys and minds for skating and for the most part we don't even realize it. Think about where your money goes.

BRIAN PERRY
1/26/03