what it is, what it was and what it shall be

Every once in a while, PDW throws a party. Saturday was one of those times. Early this spring Amanda Sundover of Backyard Blam fame approached me about working with her on her next Blam event. Having attended and sponsored the last two events she'd put together, I was excited about the opportunity. As the months crept by, she started to hash out a plan, and the plan was Cycle Speedway Flat Track Racing. I watched the videos and I was behind it. The plan was to find an outdoor venue and make it a summer event. Well, no venue materialized, so I suggested perhaps we could host an event at the space we were looking at moving into. In June, we solidified that and moved forward with plans to set up shop at the former Department of Skateboarding (RIP) location and build a track to race on. Simple.

Fast forward to last Tuesday when the ramps were supposed to be out. They weren't. In fact people were still skating on them, and I couldn't blame them. The Dept was a one of a kind, very rad place. A group of volunteers started helping with the demolition of the skatepark, and the construction of a new play area:

Here we started to manhandle the risers from the existing ramps into the boards for the track. This is turn 1 looking into turn 2.

The biggest snag for the build was this poured concrete stairway right on the front straightaway. It took a jack hammer and about 100 full wheel barrows to get it and the gravel underneath it out. This picture was snapped at about 6 pm on Wednesday. Our work was cut out for us at this point.

When we finally got the stairs out, we installed the wall skins and got right down to painting the boards around the track, and one wall for the folks from the Disposable Film Fest to project on. Thank you, Mitch, for being so tall.

While some volunteers were building the walls, some were painting the boards, Sean was taping and painting the floor. The man had a vision. Check out the hand painted logos in the next image.

About 24 hours after Sean started painting the floor, racers were out on the track starting to warm up. Let it be said that we had a pretty good crew of volunteers, without which, Holeshot would not have happened. I reckon we logged about 150 man hours building this monstrosity... round about 50 folks contested Holeshot in heats of three racers. You can get a pretty good idea what went down from Jose Sandoval's Flickr site. Great pictures, Jose! I have no idea how many folks were there... hundreds, I imagine, over the course of the 6 hours the event was going for. It was fun, it was crazy and it was loud. Very loud, especially when folks were banging their u-locks on the boards durning the races...

At the end of the night (read: just after 3 am) it was just me, these three empty kegs, some broken dreams and a big mess. It was totally worth it. Will the track stay? I doubt it. A couple of folks actually went through it. What will happen to the space? Not even we know, so stay tuned because we're pretty sure it is going to be awesome! This after all was the first night we'd really even been in the space!

So, in closing big thanks to Amanda, Jessica at Globe for providing the bicycles, 21st Ave Bicycles, The Disposable Film Fest, Kyle from The Department of Skateboarding, New Belgium for the brews, Red Bull for the DJ and lights, the volunteers (especially Phoma, Mitch, Cole, Matty B, Da Murph, J Rad, Nathan, Jake Tong, Sean and Jenny) and all the sponsors. And a series of high fives to everyone that came out to see it!