The Trailside Wheels Park will offer common skateboard and bike park features. And it has now been redesigned to cater to most anything that rolls, including scooters, inline skates and adaptive equipment used by athletes with disabilities.
Skatepark designer Jason Baldessari said he wanted to make it “approachable.”
“As I got to learn the community, I got to kind of figure out who the more advanced skaters were. And it was really cool to hear the advanced skaters speaking up on behalf of the beginner skaters and saying, ‘Hey, we need a warm-up area. We need a place that beginners can go and learn and not be in harm's way,’” Baldessari told the Basin Rec board June 11. “Just a really great community.”
The board approved the consultant’s final design June 11 as well.
It builds off the skatepark’s existing footprint on the south side of Trailside Park, between the basketball courts and mountain bike trails. The footprint will grow from about 17,000 to almost 25,000 square feet.
Users will be able to skate and pedal straight into the bottom of a new bowl area on the east side, along with dropping in.
Baldessari said he avoided deep bowls like at Park City’s City Park or along the Wasatch Front to make it different from existing options.
There will still be rails, stairs and other traditional features. The old pump track has been removed, but there are connected, flowing elements intended to function like a pump track.
The park redesign also features a plaza seating area, another effort at inclusivity. Basin Rec District Director Robert Parrish said he saw the benefits of that at a skatepark in Scotland.
“It was a family event,” he said. “The parents were there, the younger kids, my 3-year-old grandson was on there in his little push bike, in his little section that he could do.”
Basin Rec budgeted for the $1.85 million wheels park last year. A state grant is covering $500,000 of that.
The district says Trailside’s upper playground, courts and dog park may see intermittent closures during construction.
A timeline hasn’t been announced yet. Basin Rec plans to share the latest updates about the wheels park in a newsletter.
