updated: August 26, 2010 — link to part 2 added

A little while back Bob Kron­bauer from VancouverIsAwesome.com (http://www NULL.van­couv­er­isawe­some NULL.com) hit me up to see if I’d be inter­ested in con­trib­ut­ing a short series about the Vanier Park Dirt Jumps – some­thing that could explain a bit of the process that happens behind-the-scenes of getting a project like that to become a reality. I’m always keen to get the word out about these kinds of pro­jects, and Van­couver Is Awesome is exactly the kind of plat­form that’s perfect for this series. I’m really down with the VIA concept, so I’m quite happy to do put some time into this. And, maybe some­body will learn a thing or two and be inspired to make some­thing like this happen in their neighbourhood/town/city. I’ve got over 15 years of exper­i­ence working with city coun­cil­lors and park boards on skate­parks, so I’m happy to share some of my ideas.

I’ll admit it’s quite a chal­lenge to edit down the past 10+ years of this process into a digest­ible (short), inter­est­ing story. People aren’t likely to sit down and read a story like this on a blog, so this series will merely skim the surface of the process, but maybe people will be inter­ested in knowing a bit more about how much work goes into getting a skate­park or dirt jump facil­ity made. They just don’t magic­ally show up one day. Public pro­jects like this drag on for years, and are mostly unin­ter­est­ing, so I’m inter­ested in what kind of feed­back we get on this.

I’ll be sure to come back and add links the other parts of the series as they go live, but for now, you can start here:

In The Dirt Series! Part One: Vanier Park History
(http://vancouverisawesome NULL.com/2010/07/14/in-the-dirt-series-part-one-vanier-park-history/)In The Dirt Series! Part Two: Coming Together (http://vancouverisawesome NULL.com/2010/08/25/in-the-dirt-series-part-two-coming-together/)

This is great timing for this series to come out – fresh off the very suc­cess­ful launch of the Van­couver Skate­board Coalition’s (http://www NULL.vsbc NULL.ca/) Kens­ing­ton Park skatepark/pool (the last 2 pic­tures shown here), we’ve had a lot of momentum as of late, and a lot of the pro­jects we’ve been working years on are all coming to com­ple­tion by end of summer.