It seems like every year we try to capture the skateboard skills we’ve learned over the year into a single annual skate video. This year we thought it would be fun to show two videos created nearly 3 years apart. The first video shows Alejandro skating in late December 2006 at the Greenwood Village Skate Park.

For this year’s annual 2009 video we decided to mix it up a bit and have some skateboard video footage from Greenwood Village, Redstone in Highlands Ranch and Castle Rock, Colorado. Enjoy and please let us know what you think. Happy New Year!

The City of Brighton celebrated the grand opening of its new concrete skate park on 10/18/2008 with give-aways, demos, a ribbon cutting, a DJ and more. Check out the festivities and a little skating to boot on the video below. 

We got to the park early to get some skating in before the city’s official presentation. We thought there might be a skate competition and wanted to get a feel for the park beforehand. The street course is particularly interesting and has a little of something for everyone.

This is a well-designed park and worth the trip from the Denver area. The skaters take skating seriously so you’ll need to bring your A game if you intend to play SKATE. The address for the park Brighton Skate Park is 1101 Judicial Center Drive, Brighton 80601.

On Sunday September 7th, we travelled to several different skateparks in the Denver metropolitan area. We call these skateboard adventures “Great Alsup Skateboard Tours”. We typically get up early, have a hearty breakfast, jump in the car and hit a variety of skateparks. On this outing, we went to downtown Denver, Castle Rock and Redstone (Highlands Ranch).

We arrived at the downtown Denver skatepark somewhere between 8:30AM and 9:00AM. BTW: This is the best time to skate this park since it can get really crowded later in the day on weekends. One popular part of this park is the wave at the southeast corner. There are 4 or 5 humps of increasing size that allows you to build momentum for jumping obstacles. I landed 3 cones several times before we decided to go to Castle Rock for some street activity.

It’s a long drive from downtown Denver to Castle Rock, but it goes quickly because we talk about tricks and technique in the car. The Castle Rock skatepark has some good terrain to practice street tricks, like rails and stairs, without a lot of risk. I landed a back-side 180 and a pop-shove-it over the stairs and to finish the day off I finally did a boardslide on the inclined rail.

We came, we skated, we left…It was a good day!

Every year we go back to see our grandparents in Parkersburg, West Virginia. There are not very many skateparks in the area, but it is fun to go exploring down the Ohio river and our grandmother always has a lot of Summer things for us to do. This year we took an airplane so we didn’t stop at any skateparks on the way from Colorado. Nonetheless, when we got to the area we started looking around for skate parks.

The first skate park we went to was in Marietta, Ohio since it was the closest park to our grandparents home. There really wasn’t much there: 5 foot half pipe, 1 foot spine, small ledge and a quarter bowl. There’s a pretty strong group of skaters in Marietta, but my guess is the adults and city governments in southeast Ohio just don’t get the idea that skateboarding is a lot more than a past time for kids with nothing else to do.

On the weekend, we headed up to Athens Ohio where we found a nice concrete park. We wondered how old the park was because the surface was pretty beat up, then some sk8rs told us it was built only a few years ago. I’m not sure if it’s the humidity or what, but the surface at this park seems to have aged a lot in just 2 years. When we arrived in Athens it was 10:00AM and the sk8rs were already leaving because of the heat, so I guess you either skate really early in the morning or later at night since it looked like there was some nice lighting. In any event, there was a lot of good terrain and we skated it for nearly an hour.

Finally, in Athens some sk8rs told us about a park about 30 miles away called Skatopia. It sounded really interesting so we packed up the car and headed to Rutland, Ohio. Now, this park is hard to find, but well worth the effort. There was a skateboard museum with 100s of skateboards from past decades. There was a barn retrofitted for skating with massive 16 foot dropins! At the top of the property was a concrete park with a real school bus built into one of the bowls. We’d never seen anything like it. The park quickly became one of our top skate adventures of all time. Thanks Brewce, you rock! I hope you stay young forever!

Hi Everyybody, we skated several times over the weekend. On Saturday, we started at our favorite skate park “McKinnley Skateboard Park” in Greenwood Village, Colorado: NOTE: If you want to catch us skate your best bet really is this skatepark! It was fun skating Greenwood, but eventually we decided to see what was up at Redstone skatepark, (Highlands Ranch) and down in Castle Rock. At Redstone, Alejandro successfully tried his fakie air 180 from the snake and Andre perfected his axle stall. At Castle Rock, Andre axle stalled a bit more and Alejandro did the long rail next to the small bowl.

At Greenwood, there was a Mom there (Karen) in the morning and my dad helped her kid (James) drop in the 4′. He did a great job! Then, later we came back and the place was packed. At first, we just thought everyone in Colorado had “cabin fever”, but then we found out there was a birthday party going on. It was kind of amateur hour, but my dad said he made friends with the father (David) of the son having the birthday party. At least his son could skate.

OK then, until next time…SK8NE1?