On a windy Easter Sunday in Bolinas, Keelan McDorman ripped on his razor scooter down one end of a concrete half-pipe ramp, crested the edge of the other end, paused and shot back across to where he’d started. He and a few college friends from the East Bay were in town to check out the skate park off Mesa Road as the last stop along their skating tour, which began earlier that day at another, larger park in San Rafael.
The park in Bolinas, Mr. McDorman said, was more challenging—and therefore more enjoyable—despite its small size. “It’s great for us,” said Mr. McDorman, a native Coloradan who’s been skating for as long as he can remember. “But it’s definitely for more experienced people.”
These days, a group of Bolinas skaters are hoping to change that opinion. In February, they launched a campaign aimed at fundraising around $100,000 to expand the skate park, which they say is too difficult for less-seasoned skaters to tackle and which has remained incomplete since 2006.
The expansion, they say, will not only give younger kids a place to learn how to skate other than on downtown streets, but also build community by bringing together local volunteers for work days and fundraisers at a time when the town is beset by visitor traffic and declining affordable housing.
“That’s a big part of this project: trying to bring the community together,” said Tyrone Brendel, a 26-year-old Bolinas native who spearheaded the fundraising effort. “It’s going to be very community-oriented. And I want it to be a place for the new kids of Bolinas to hang out and be
together.”
Tucked behind the parking lot at the grassy, flat Mesa Park, which looks out at the towering Bolinas Ridge, the skate park consists of two graffiti-plastered half-pipe ramps with a couple of tall metal rails meant for grinding. Typically, Mr. Brendel said, skaters switch back and forth between the two ramps; the flat staging area in between gives little sense of the smooth, uninterrupted “flow” other skaters might feel at a better designed park.
With enough funds, Mr. Brendel and his friends hope to build out the park into a bowl shape, which would create that desired flow and give enough space for younger kids to have their own separate, less-daunting practice area. So far, they have raised around $20,000 in private donations, and have set up a Gofundme page.
The Bolinas skate park was the only of its kind to emerge in West Marin after efforts to build similar parks in Point Reyes Station and the San Geronimo Valley in the early 2000s faltered. Skaters had been kicking around the idea of a bringing a permanent park to town since at least the late 1990s, when all they had to use were wooden ramps set up near the beach (those were eventually torn down by Marin County sheriffs. Mr. Brendal said).
By 2001, Mark Butler, a longtime resident, had secured $133,000 from the state’s Department of Parks and Recreation, matching grants and many thousands more in local donations. Three years later, the county approved a design for a circular, 7,000-square-foot park located in the parking lot.
But that plan was scrapped soon afterward, when the Mesa Park agency—which leases the land from the Bolinas Community Public Utility District—refused to allow any construction in the parking lot, Mr. Butler said.
That setback prompted the designer—a Novato-based architect who masterminded the popular Alameda Skate Park—to abruptly quit.
“That just incensed him,” Mr. Butler said. “It all got quickly out of hand and he just quit. So I was thrown into the position of overseeing the whole project, which was not my intention initially.”
Determined to push the project through, he hired an Arizona company to produce a $20,000 design for the vastly scaled-down structure that stands today.
The semi-finished skate park sucked up tens of thousands of dollars in materials and professional labor costs, and hundreds of volunteer labor hours. The last three months alone, Mr. Butler himself worked around 60 hours a week to get the project done. Now, he said, he would love to see a bowl-shaped park finally come to fruition.
But that kind of build-out will be costly, especially since any expansion will be restricted to the mud-prone grasslands abutting the parking lot. Back when designs were first drafted, locals involved with the project estimated that building a bowl-shaped park would require either an elaborate pumping system or around $20,000-worth of concrete to keep pressurized groundwater from breaching the bottom.
The new project has support from Mesa Park, however, which has pledged to allocate Measure A parcel tax funds to help finance it. The board’s vice president, Dylan Squires, said the nonprofit will act as the fiscal sponsor for the
project.
“There is an immense amount of interest in the project, and we support it,” Mr. Squires said.
Aside from skating, others involved in the project hope a revamped park will help kids develop surfing skills. Skating strengthens similar sets of muscles, said Nick O’Connor, a 32-year-old Bolinas native who has seen how much quicker kids who’ve grown up using the skate park have picked up surfing.
“It’s really incredible to see the next generation and the generation below them be able to utilize this, and to see how fast they’re able to progress, so much faster than I was able to,” Mr. O’Connor said. “If they have even more [access], the possibilities become so much more for the culture of Bolinas.”
To donate to the Bolinas skate park project, visit gofundme.com/bolinasskatepark.