Local teens work to keep skateboard season going

WASILLA — Nobody’s going to accuse a pair of local skaters of being slackers.

Brandon Johnson, 16, and Emily Thomas, 17, recently spent an icy Friday afternoon attached to the business end of a pair of shovels, working diligently to clear several inches of fresh snow off the concrete at the Wasilla skate park. It’s the second time the duo has used hand tools to clear the small park in order to squeeze a few more sessions in before winter.

“It’s not over for skate season yet, I don’t care how much is snows,” said Thomas, who’s been skating for about a year.

Both said they were among about a dozen regulars at the park this summer, and wanted to keep the season going as long as possible.

“There’s not enough snow in the mountains for us to go snowboarding and skateboarding is one of our main hobbies in the summer so we decided to keep it going,” said Johnson, who has been skating since he was 5.

After the first snowfall of the season, the pair scraped a thin layer of snow off the park and used a torch to dry the concrete.

“We came and shoveled it out a little bit and I have a propane torch we used to get the water off,” Johnson said.

Their initial efforts paid off with about a week’s worth of extended skating.

After Wasilla received a couple inches of new snow over the weekend, Johnson said he figured they might as well break out the shovels once again.

“We’re just down here doing what we can,” he said.

Johnson and Thomas might not know it, but their work is in a long tradition of skateboarders doing anything and everything for the sport they love. According to the official website of the Oslo Games, skateboarding was banned in Norway between 1977 and 1989. During that time, renegade Norwegian skaters would hide out in the woods or skate inside giant steel pipes to escape the gaze of authorities.

Thomas said the work she and Johnson have done to keep skating alive in Wasilla hasn’t gone unnoticed.

“When we first started shoveling like three other kids came and started skating,” she said.

With Alaska’s short summer — and almost no indoor options — she said the hard work is what’s needed to keep rolling.

“You just take all the weeks left you can get,” she said.

Johnson agreed. Plus, he said, getting outside and working hard — in spite of temperatures in the low teens — beats the alternative of sitting on the couch.

“We’d rather be out here than drinking hot cocoa inside,” he said.

Contact editor Matt Tunseth at 352-2268 or news@frontiersman.com