Registered: September 2008 Location: Eagle Rock Posts: 3
Review Date: Tue September 23, 2008
Would you recommend the skatepark? Yes
| Rating: 7
Great for the younger crowd but high traffic days get burly with collisions. Fun poolish turns with nothing over 6 ft. Good hybrid between street and pool. Don't like paying too much but with a little charm and a little hustle you should be able to score entre.
Would you recommend the skatepark? Yes
| Rating: 8
Burbank Skatepark is technically named Valley Park Skatepark and is without a doubt the best beginner skatepark I have found in Los Angeles. Yepper doodle, this is a fun one. Nothing is bigger than 4 feet high - even the amoeba bowl is only 4 feet deep!
The park is way small, but it still intimidated the bejeezus out of me the first time I rode it. I had never been in such a huge cement skatepark in my life! Of course, that's because I had never been to ANY cement skatepark. The terrain was amazing and endless and so unbelievably cool! When I look at it now, the place seems tiny and simple to ride and not remotely daunting; Funny how ones perspective changes with experience.
Anyhow, being my first cement skatepark, I went to Burbank multiple times a week (for nearly a year) before I mustered enough courage to ride bigger places. I was too overwhelmed by the enormous terrain of other skateparks. Burbank was mellow and easy-going and a fantastic way to slowly assimilate myself into carving bowls for the first time.
Speaking of bowl carving, the flow in the park is a lot of fun too. Once you can pump transitions and carve, you can actually get up a lot of speed and move around the entire park without ever putting your foot down. That's kinda cool. I can't think of many others parks where that can be done.
There is a killer little horseshoe minihalf which is a fantastic spot to learn how to carve a corner and perfect your kickturns. The amoeba bowl is really a hardy test for a grom; the transitions are VERY tight - only 4 feet high, but it almost has vert on it! Plus, there are no roll-ins into the bowl. This may seem like a poor design - there should have been a roll-in and more gradual transitions for a beginner park. However, the fact that the design of the bowl is so odd is actually an advantage because once you learn to pump and carve that little guy, you can pretty much carve any bowl. Pools are another story - it doesn't help much with learning those. But bowls? Yep. Great minibowl to learn with.
Lots of grommets tend to fill up the park, so watch for them. They also have very strange hours - mostly catering to kids being in school - and sadly close VERY early on weekends (like 5:00pm) which is really stupid because they have lights and could easily remain open until 10:00pm like most parks. Be sure to check the Burbank website and get the skatepark schedule from their Parks & Recreation .PDF file. The park is supervised and you have to wear pads and pay to skate. Daily passes are available and they also provide an annual pass. The place is surrounded by trees, so a lot of twigs and leaves can end up in the bowl. Note you may need to borrow the broom and sweep up the bowl from time-to-time.
Personally, I don't skate the place as often anymore, simply because other skateparks are more challenging for me now. Nevertheless, it's still a very fun little park to have some mellow sessions on occasion. If you are a beginner, or getting back into skating from a long absence, I highly recommend the place. Fun park. Definitely check it out. In fact, most of my skateboarding instructional video (www.LearnToRideASkateboard.com) was shot right there in Burbank.
Oh, and if you see the cute blonde staff-worker chick there, tell her I said hello... Even though I only saw her working once in the last 2.5 years. :/
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