Skatepark Tour - Sandy, Oregon (USA)

The return of the screeching scooter girl! Despite this being the closest skatepark to where I generally sleep, I’ve only gotten here a handful of times. Almost every one of these times, there’s been this one particular little scooter girl in a pink helmet, that screams every time a someone gets even remotely near her; safely, need I add. I’m starting to call this park, lovingly, the “day care”.

This daycare center was kind of a surprise to me. A few months ago, when I first showed back up to the Mount Hood area, I was excited to skate our local DIY.. and it turned out it had been torn down. After grieving the only place to skate without burning a quarter tank of gas, I decided to go down the hill to the Sandy skatepark.. one of the shittiest parks I’ve ever skated. Instead, upon arriving, I found that the old nonsensical park had been replaced by this AMAZING new park. It definitely cheered me up a bit.

Alright, enough of that bullshit. Here’s the brand new park about 45 minutes down the hill from where I’m currently working. Needless to say, the place is pretty damn sick. I wasn’t even sure how to best take photos of it to document the different random little pieces of it.. I mean, I definitely noticed I missed some shit looking through these photos.. or at least wish I had taken close ups of some of it.

The first thing I got excited about when I first pulled up a few months ago was the plethora of round bars. Unfortunately, I quickly realized that not a single one was just like.. a normal bar; that is, lacking transition at at least one end of it. I’m not bummin’ on it- it just means I need to learn how to skate rails popping out of transition better. And as the legs have been warming back up after a couple year hiatus recently, I’m feeling a little more confident about them. I might be officially old now(I’m 33), but I can still learn how to skate rails faster 🤷‍♂️

Also, that little brick quarter pipe thingy on the left side of the above photo is up there for my favorite features. Coming over it like a hip, it feels a bit like a wallie and kinda just launches you without having to pop. With the brick under the wheels, it feels really cool.

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One thing I regret not taking a specific picture of is the weird little transition with rock coping you can see in the above photo. It’s super small, steep.. kinda weird overall. And the random rocks buried in the coping make it super interesting. I will blunt fakie it before I leave this town.. I promise myself 😂

The UFO type thing in the middle is super dope! It would be a kind of awkward section of the park without something in the middle; and as most park builders I feel like would opt for some sort of nipple/pyramid here, I really like the flying saucer type thing instead. It’s super fun to go just straight through; but also, you can ride the rim of it to kinda redirect to any direction you want. It’s surprisingly difficult to actually just ride around the crest of it.. which creates cool accidental lines when you eventually are caused to opt out due to your weight distribution.

The slappy curb on top of the wall is fucking awesome as well. I haven’t really figured out the best way to skate it yet, but I’m stoked it’s there.

Alright, these random rocks are high key one of my favorite parts of the park. Mostly because, when it’s crowded as FUCK, it’s fun to just skate laps around the peanut bowl and wallie/ride/pop into/whatever the rocks. It can be the only skateable part of the park during certain parts of the day- and no one else seems to enjoy the rocks as much as I. So it’s always a good fail safe to avoid getting killed by a 6 year old lmao

And here we have the large bowl. It’s kind of hard to get a photo of it that does it justice.. i coulda sworn I took at least one other from a different angle but apparently I did not. I deleted one photo of my foot/shadow.. so that was probably the one I took, and miscalculated phone response time 😂 anyways, you get the picture. It’s pretty fun, I kinda suck at bowl skating, so I don’t do much but pump around and occasionally utilize the spine. It’s a lot more mellow than the smaller peanut bowl too- that thing is steep as hell for how small it is; it’s supposed to represent a classic swimming pool.

And now….

The surprise bonus! This extensive asphalt bike pump track is 100% skateable. The pavement isn’t super smooth, and the asphalt even gets a little soft on hot, sunny days; but it is so fun. I often find myself just spontaneously dipping out of the skatepark to go ride different parts of this thing. It’s a fucking work out

(random side note but I saw a clip of someone skating the wood slatted jumps on instagram. He musta had HELLA big wheels, that shit is sketchy. But possible)

You get the picture. All in all this park is super fun. It was a pretty necessary upgrade- the last park, in the same place, was so fucking bad. Like, I’ve seen much worse parks, especially growing up in New England.. but the problem with the old Sandy park is that they put fuckin work in. It was all concrete, and pretty large.. but absolutely nothing worked. You couldn’t skate shit. And the whole park was on a hill: rather than level the ground, they just kept it at grade. Enough talking about old bullshit, though haha.

Oh and last but not least, there’s river access a short hike down the woods from the park :) Real nice spot to jump in after getting sweaty as shit in the microwave park. I wrote this on the bus to Portland, so hopefully I’ll have some PDX parks to share with y’all soon. Skate hard and skate much, my friends 🖤