New Westerners

Missoula Skatepark Association: A Non-Profit Success Story

By Dylan Tucker, 5-05-06

	Above: Chris Bacon takes a callabout the new skatepark while working at Edge of the World on Monday. Below: Ross Peterson, left, inspects the construction of the Missoula public skatepark with Keenan, a skatepark builder from Grindline. Photos by Dylan Tucker

The empty parking lot below the south side of the Higgins Street Bridge in downtown Missoula had become an eyesore. Filled with old beer cans, cigarette butts and broken glass, the lot was a favorite lurking spot for the homeless and a problem for the Boone & Crockett Club, whose building bordered the lot. But it had potential, at least to local skateboarders. The cement braces looked perfect for supporting skateboard ramps. And underneath the grime, the pavement was smooth and dry.

“We just started fixing it up one day,” Ross Peterson says. “We went down there with big brooms and just went to town. We got some ramps down there, and the ball started rolling.”

It was June 1999, and a small group of local skateboarders built a tiny spot to skate under the bridge. Skaters kept it clean and free of graffiti and no one seemed to mind. But by the end of summer, the city caught wind of the ramps and rails the kids had put up, and ordered them out.

In 1999, Ross Peterson and Chris Bacon were just a couple of skateboarders trying to have fun. Today the two friends are the backbone of one of Missoula’s most successful non-profit organizations, and are heading up a construction project in downtown Missoula with a price tag of over half a million dollars. Ironically, the pair rarely has time to skateboard anymore.

Bacon still gets frustrated when he talks about the events back in 1999. Wiry and animated, his eyes get wider as he talks about those early obstacles.

“It was strange, it was just unexpected,” he says. “We’d been told we could be there and then I guess the wrong people heard about it and it was like, ‘you're out!’”

The city removed the ramps, and the skaters' story landed them in the local newspaper. That is where Donna Gaulker first noticed the guys. Gaulker is the director of Missoula Parks & Recreation, and she asked the skaters to come in and talk.

She suggested several ideas to the skaters, including setting up their own non-profit. With no money to even file paperwork, the local skaters did their best. In 2003, they formed the Missoula Skatepark Association and received a generous promise from the city: If they raised all of the money themselves, the city would include a skatepark in their park redevelopment plans. The guys needed a plan.

“That was when we really got things going,” Peterson says. “We started the Web site, the project just started feeling like it could be a reality.”

In a town with more non-profit organizations vying for the donation dollar than almost anywhere else, the pair has managed to set the Missoula Skatepark Association apart through their creativity and passion.

“We knew it was going to take more than some bake sales,” Bacon says.

Chris Bacon stands out from his surroundings. One wild hairdo after another often accents his sharp features. He never takes himself too seriously, and he prefers brightly colored clothing that he gives a style of his own. At 29, Bacon seems more like a teenager than president of one of Missoula’s most successful non-profits. Chris has three jobs. He manages the local skateboard shop. He plays keyboards for two Missoula rock bands, (the Volumen and Bacon & Egg), and he works more than 40 hours a week for the skatepark association. Which leaves him little time for the things he loves. He hasn’t ridden a skateboard in weeks.

He and his wife Syd live in a modest home on the west side of Missoula. Like the young couple, the house has a personality all it’s own. The kitchen walls are lined with tiny figurines from grocery store vending machines. The house is filled with musical instruments, skateboards, art, odd children’s toys and records. Stacks of records. Piles of Records. Mountains of records.

The Doobie Brothers. Pat Benetar. Twisted Sister. Prince. The Flaming Lips. Lief Garrett. K.C. and the Sunshine Band. Def Leppard.

“The whole collection has got to be worth, what I don’t know ... five, six dollars?” Bacon said.

One room of the house serves as Bacon’s office, and he has logged countless hours in the cluttered room on grants, proposals and paperwork for the skatepark he dreams of. The success of the Missoula Skatepark Association is largely based on Bacon’s work ethic.

Bacon manages Edge of the World, a local skateboard, snowboard and kayak store. He was able to quickly tap into the network of Missoulians that love extreme sports.

“Chris will work all day at the shop, then all night on skatepark stuff. He doesn’t slow down,” says Jake Barrow, owner of Edge of the World.

Bacon estimates that he works four or five hours a day on the skatepark process.

“I’d rather be home with Syd, or playing music, or skating- but this is what it takes to get things done,” Bacon says.

In two short years, Bacon and the Missoula Skatepark Association have raised more than half a million dollars, hired the country’s premiere skatepark builders, and began construction on a 15,000 sq. ft. skatepark. They have organized concerts and contests; movie premieres and art auctions, raffles and barbeques. The money has come in single ones from teenage skaters, and large in-kind donations from local businesses.

A few hundred from selling t-shirts, a few thousand from a federal grant. Today, standing at the site in McCormick Park, while Grindline builders shape a ten-foot bowl behind him, Peterson can’t believe it will be finished soon.

“I keep running around from the skaters to the builders, just being the middle man,” he says. “Everybody has all these questions, and I feel like I still have to answer them all or it will all fall apart.” Peterson says.

The skatepark is close to completion. Peterson visits the site sometimes two or three times a day, taking pictures for the association’s web site, and talking with Grindline. Grindline’s unorthodox style and creativity have made them the most sought-after skatepark builders in the country. They are as well known for their challenging and beautifully crafted designs as they are for their cantankerous manners. These are the Picassos of the skateboard world- artists to be left alone to create masterpieces.

Peterson calls out to one of the workers, who have been pulling a frame off a 16-foot cradle- a giant half-sphere meant for skaters to defy gravity and spin upside down.

“So what is the radius of this thing again?” Peterson asks, and the worker hollers back his answer in a few short words.

“They’re getting so sick of me,” Peterson says, laughing. Peterson smiles with his whole face. His blue eyes shin behind a sun-toughened face and his unkempt blonde hair sticks out in wisps in every direction but combed. Inside the small house he owns in central Missoula, the leather couches and glass tables, the flat screen TV mounted on the wall and the wood detailing are hard to match up with the rebel image of the skateboarder. But Peterson is every bit a skateboarder, grown up.

In his snap-button western style shirt untucked over wrinkled khakis, he looks every bit the web designer that he is. But the sneakers, Vans with a telltale hole on one foot, are every bit skateboarder. During the day, he works as a web developer at Modwest, a local Internet hosting company, and is the treasurer for the MSA.

At 30, Ross Peterson is the natural spokesman for Missoula skateboarding. Handsome, athletic and soft-spoken, Peterson has a knack for listening that makes people at ease and he often plays interpreter between local skateboarders and city officials. He has presented the skatepark to charitable organizations across Montana. The Missoula skatepark is his baby. He designed and maintains the Web site, which receives over 150 hits per day. He hopes to pass it on to other towns as a model to help them get skateparks as well.

“There are so many towns around here that can do this,” he says. “I want this to take on a life of it’s own. I feel like this thing is just being born, and now there is this park thing that can just keep growing.”

Ross grew up skateboarding in Missoula. As a kid, he and his dad built a 5-foot ramp in the backyard of the South Hills home. The ramp was too big for Ross and his friends at the time, and they cut it down to 3 feet. But soon they had outgrown it.

“We didn’t know what we were doing,” he says.

Many of the Missoula Skatepark Association’s volunteers grew up skateboarding with Peterson. The board boasts five board members, and they rely heavily on their ties to the community for all of their events. This past summer, more than fifty volunteers came out to help park cars at a concert series at the Big Sky Brewery. Seeing the outpouring of support for their cause is has been a key to their success.

“That’s what has kept us going,” Peterson says. “We’ve used every connection we have to this town to keep this going.”

But it hasn’t been easy. Unpaid volunteers aren’t always reliable, and much of the work falls to their shoulders. Organizing volunteers for a rap concert by 50 Cent proved to be a particular challenge.

“We were really scared about that one,” Peterson says. “We just had no idea what we were in for.”

Peterson and Bacon organized beer sales, parking, and counted every dollar that night, by hand. In the end, it went off without a hitch. But the pair learned early on that the best results came from trusting each other.

For the partners, being able to count on each other has brought them through hard times. The hardest part of the project has been keeping positive in the face of piles of paperwork, and hundreds of no-show volunteers.

“We’ve always been able to count on each other. We just do what we say we’re going to do, and that way we’ve always been able to know that the other is working just as hard,” Peterson says.

It is a sunny Saturday afternoon, and Chris Bacon is sitting at a folding table in a downtown Missoula parking lot. In front of him are stacks of t-shirts, brochures and entry forms. In front of him, about fifty local teens are competing for prizes, flipping their skateboards around under their feet. Each has paid $10 to enter, all of which goes into the Association’s account. Neither Bacon nor Peterson is paid for their time, and the group is completely volunteer-based.

Bacon arrived to set up the contest at ten in the morning. After the contest ends, he’ll meet Peterson at the Crystal Theater to run a movie premiere. By the end of the day, Bacon will have worked eleven hours straight for the MSA.

Peterson comes up behind the table, holding out his digital camera at Bacon. On the camera is a picture of Ross in a full wetsuit, surfing. It is from that morning, and it was taken at Brennan’s wave on the Clark Fork River. Ross’s smile is ear to ear.

“I’m pretty sure I’m the first one,” he tells Bacon.

The sun is blazing, and Bacon’s wife Syd sits close by in a lawn chair, watching the contest. The couple is expecting their first child, and Syd jokingly calls it her “bacon bit.” Bacon first heard his child’s heartbeat on the day he left town on a month-long tour with his band.

“It is so crazy,” Bacon says. “This project has been everything for so long. But once you hear that heartbeat, everything changes. I’m really looking forward to being able to skate again, come home and see my baby, all that stuff.”

In July, the skatepark that the pair has worked on for more than five years will be completed. Fundraising efforts will end on June 21st, national “go skateboarding” day. The partners are looking forward to some time off, but they don’t think it will be for long. Skateboarders from across Montana have already been calling them, wondering how they can get a skatepark started in their town.

“This thing could just go on and on,” Peterson says. “You just know that there are skaters all around that need us to just open the doors for them.”

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