Wyoming News

Snowboarding and Skateboarding

Lamenting Laramie: Why Colorado Has More to Offer Boarders

By Shane K. Staley, 4-05-11

Skateboarding day camps for kids: Yet another plus for Wyoming boarders to leave Wyoming.

For many in the skate and snowboard community of Laramie, Wyoming, Colorado beckons, even to the point of talent uprooting itself and moving to its southern neighbor.

As boarders head south, what’s left is a kind of void in the skate/snowboard community. Skating and boarding crews are left without members. Those skaters and boarders who remain part of these groups may even become less interested in skating with fewer members to take to Laramie’s streets and its skate park.

But those who leave have their reasons. Colorado, it seems, just has more to offer.

This is especially true when you consider the number of snowboarding destinations available to those who move to one of the resort communities in Colorado. In Summit County, for example, they can choose Keystone, Breckenridge and Copper Mountain.

In Laramie, you only have one option for a ski area to ride: Snowy Range.

The same can be said for skate parks. Summit County has Silverthorne and another in Breckenridge, just a 15-minute drive apart.

Denver and its suburbs offer even more possibilities. 

If this same person were to stay in Laramie, they would only be able to skate at the town’s sole park. If they want to skate another park, they have to drive east to the nearest park in Cheyenne, which is 45 miles away.

But, it’s not just the fact that there are more ski resorts and skate parks in Colorado than Wyoming that draws some Laramie skaters and boarders south. They’re also lured by how much more terrain there is available at Colorado resorts and skate parks.

Whether you look at the amount of terrain available at the individual resorts of Keystone, Breckenridge or Copper Mountain, they all stand as colossal giants in comparison to the dwarf that is Snowy Range.

For instance, there are so many skiable acres at Breckenridge that the mountain is able to host five terrain parks. Snowy Range is home to only one park. And when you look at the size any of the five terrain parks at Breckenridge to the park at Snowy Range, our local mountain as a whole seems even smaller (which it is) by comparison.

It’s generally the same story when you compare the size of skate parks in Colorado to the park in Laramie. Denver’s main skate park is utterly massive in comparison to the one in Laramie. While the parks in Silverthorne and Breckenridge are much smaller than the one in Denver, they, too, are larger than Laramie’s park.

Yet it’s not just the resorts and parks built for action sports that draw Laramie’s boarders south.

The areas that make up Colorado’s backcountry lure Laramie’s snowboarders away, as well.

Take Colorado’s Loveland Pass. The area, which sits alongside U.S. Route 6, is easily accessible by car, providing the snowfall is not too great. A snowboarder can park his or her car near the Continental Divide marker and easily begin a hike to one of the peaks at the pass.

While snowboarders in Laramie are not without the option of riding backcountry—both Libby Creek and the Snowy Range (the mountain, not the ski area) are excellent places to board—they can be difficult to access.

Libby Creek, which sits just west of the Snowy Range Ski Area, is only available to access by snowshoe. To get to the actual Snowy Range Mountains, you either have to own a snowmobile or catch a ride with someone who does. This is because Highway 130—the road that leads to the ski area, Libby Creek and to the actual mountain that is Snowy Range—is closed a few miles west of the ski area during the winter.

It’s much the same scenario for Laramie skateboarders who depart the small college town for cities like Fort Collins and Denver. Skateboarders leave here knowing that with larger cities—and the larger populations they support—come more places to street skate. 

Take the Denver Metro area as an example. The city and the surrounding suburbs are home to more people than exist in the entire state of Wyoming. More people mean there are more locations to skate. Downtown Denver probably has more destinations to skate than all of Wyoming’s cities combined.

That is not to say there are no places to skate street in Wyoming, specifically in Laramie. The University of Wyoming is one of the best places to skateboard in town—if not the entire state. But when compared to the larger cities of Colorado, Laramie has too little to offer where street skating is concerned.

I guess that’s why many of our local skaters and snowboarders depart for Colorado; not because Laramie has nothing to offer its boarders, but because our southern neighbor offers more.

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