Just off Mount Baker Highway on Coal Creek Road is a skate park.
It’s impressively built and a surprise if you’re not looking for it. But it’s got a nearly 20-year history. The Coal Pad DIY Skate Park started in the mid-2000s when local Jeremy Miller and other skateboard enthusiasts began building it on what was at the time a vacant lot.
The land was later auctioned off, and the buyer bought sight unseen, not realizing there was a skate park there, said Zoë Vernon, the secretary of the Glacier Skate Association, which oversees the park. It took years to get the permits and permission from the landowner to finish building the skate park, she said.
But in 2014, after a successful fundraiser, the group was able to build the bowl at the Coal Pad. Vernon said the park is now complete “as far as the initial vision,” but at some point, they hope to remodel the park.
Vernon called the Coal Pad a “destination skate park” — people come from all over the Pacific Northwest to skate there.
“It’s special to have a place like that that’s been built by the community,” she said. “It’s cool to have a skate park in the middle of the woods.”
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Charlotte Alden is CDN’s general assignment/enterprise reporter; reach her at charlottealden@cascadiadaily.com; 360-922-3090 ext. 123.
