An Oregon man and longtime rider designs public skateboard parks so good they're Sick

Steve Woodward (The Oregonian, Portland, OR) -- 3/21/2004

"Red" fell 14 times before he nailed it.

The 15th time, the persistent Oregon man made skateboarding history: the first-ever flowing loop, a 360-degree spin around the inside of a funnel-like pipe in a public skate park.

"It's hard to think when you're upside down," the famously reticent skateboarder said when he made the loop last September.

Red -- known to the outside world as Mark A. Scott, 33, of Lincoln City -- is used to rocking the skateboarding world.

Thirteen years ago, Scott led a group of young skateboarders on a mission to build a skate park under the Burnside Bridge in open defiance of Portland's permit process.

Today, Burnside is the most famous skate park in the world, and Scott is considered by many to be the nation's premier builder of public skate parks.

"He's one of those crazy, eccentric dudes," says Coan "Buddy" Nichols, a boyhood friend of Scott who co-produced "Northwest," a film documentary about skate parks of the Northwest.

"He builds stuff where people say, 'No way.' "

Under the name Dreamland Skateparks, Scott's company has built 18 parks -- including one in Austria -- that regularly attract professional skateboarders and draw raves from skateboarding media.

"They're really the da Vinci of skate-park building," says Jocko Weyland, author of the 2002 book "The Answer Is Never: A Skateboarder's History of the World."

Scott doesn't argue the point.

"We've been doing it the longest," he says. "We're the closest to perfect as any company out there. That's kind of our claim to fame."

Dreamland's parks have put Oregon towns such as Aumsville, Donald and Klamath Falls on the international skateboarding map.

So have the parks of two friendly competitors in the Northwest: Grindline Skateparks of Seattle, which is owned by Mark "Monk" Hubbard, a longtime friend of Scott, and Airspeed Skateparks of Florence, which is owned by Geth Noble and Stephanie Mohler, two former co-workers of Scott.

Airspeed built the Reedsport skate park in which Scott accomplished his 360-degree flowing loop in September.

Because of the presence of so many Dreamland, Grindline and Airspeed parks in Oregon, Washington and Idaho, the Northwest has become known as a mecca of skateboarding.

"There's this really strange phenomenon around Oregon and Washington, where they have built the best skate parks ever in these isolated areas," Weyland says.

Skateboarder Magazine's "five gnarliest parks" include two Dreamland parks -- Aumsville and Klamath Falls -- as well as Burnside.

A highly trafficked Internet skateboarding forum, Concrete Disciples, lists three Dreamland parks among its top 10: Lincoln City, Newberg and Hailey, Idaho.

In skateboarder parlance, the parks are "sick." That's a good thing: baby-butt-smooth concrete, challenging vertical ramps, deep bowls, moguls on which to build up speed and seemingly endless lines to skate.

Both Nichols and Weyland say Scott's parks are on a par with works by such big-name sculptors as Richard Serra.

"If you took the skating out of it and just looked at it," Nichols says, "it is super artistic."

Scott credits the Burnside park with teaching him how to build parks that skateboarders want to ride.

"Burnside was a good experience to learn," Scott says, noting that he and his colleagues worked on the park for years, sometimes pouring concrete six layers deep. "I helped pour 99 percent of the concrete down there."

Bret Taylor, a Portland designer who helped pour Burnside's first bucket of concrete, says Scott came into the project with persistence and vision.

"He wanted to make things big right from the start," Taylor says. "When he jumped in, he really pushed," keeping the team on schedule.

"The reason he was able to assume a leadership role," Taylor says, "had something to do with his being such a dominating skater."

Scott has been skating for 26 years, the past 15 of them seriously.

"He's just a gnarly skater," Weyland says. "He has a really distinctive style."

What kind of style? a reporter asks Scott.

"Hey, Danyel," he calls to his wife. "What's my skating style like?"

"Neanderthal," Danyel answers.

Scott breaks into laughter.

Early on, Scott's father, a carpenter, let his son build a vertical ramp in the back yard of their Tigard home. Nichols recalls that the ramp was an intimidating 10 feet tall on one side and six feet on the other.

"Everybody's spoiled these days," Scott says. "In Oregon, there are a lot of good parks. When I was younger -- the age most typically think of as skateboarders, 12 to 17 -- I had to make my own stuff."

By the time Scott and his colleagues started building parks, they were able to take advantage of two converging trends. First, skateboarding had become a mainstream sport, with more kids boarding than playing baseball. Second, municipalities began to build skate parks to accommodate kids who needed a safe, legal place to skate.

In 1999, Lincoln City was the first city to take a chance on the team that would become Dreamland.

"They were scary at first," recalls Ron Ploger, director of parks and recreation. "They had no working experience. We had a bunch of wild-looking guys with tattoos, and you're thinking, 'What did I get myself into?' "

But Scott and his team came highly recommended by skateboarders because of their experience with Burnside. Within months, the $65,000 project was done.

Thrasher magazine crowned it the "gnarliest" park in America.

Four years later, Lincoln City invited Dreamland back to build a second, $125,000 covered skate park next to the original.

In 2001, Dreamland did its only overseas project, The Cradle Skatepark, commissioned by several villages and a city in the Tyrolean region of Austria.

"All the skaters from the area and all visitors from around the world are very impressed (with) this park," says Friedrich Margreiter, chairman of the Skate+Board-Club 31, which maintains the park. "It is the (hardest) and heaviest park they have ever seen."

Scott is known as a stickler who gets as dirty as any of his crew spraying and troweling wet concrete.

"He's a perfectionist, especially when it comes to finishing concrete," says Tim Payne, owner of Florida-based Team Pain, a highly respected skate-park builder. Scott worked for Payne before he went into business for himself.

"A lot of cities see us as concrete pourers or wood joiners," Payne says of skate-park builders. "Mark and I have broken the mold on that bid process. The process now gives the design of the park to us, instead of the architect."

That's important to Dreamland's crew -- all considered top-flight skaters -- because they prefer to design as they build, testing each day's work by riding on it themselves. That way, they can make design adjustments on the fly.

At present, Dreamland is wrapping up a project for the city of Bloomington, Ind. Next, the company has projects lined up in Milton-Freewater and North Little Rock, Ark., as well as prospects as far away as Hawaii and Saudi Arabia.

"The man's out there," Nichols says of Scott, "doing it better than anyone else."