After Avery nails a 180 over the cone, the Kingsburys have an idea: “Jump over us.”
Dave Kingsbury ate shit 53 times trying to land a blunt on a skateboard ramp he built at his Nederland home. His son Quinn, just 4 years old at the time, sat there keeping tallies each time his dad attempted to “levitate” on the ramp. It was a teaching moment, but it wasn’t about skateboarding.
“I said, ‘I’m gonna try this trick 50 times, and I’m either going to the hospital or landing the trick,’” Dave says. “What I was trying to pass on is, ‘Don’t give up.’”
On try 54, he stomped it.
Is it insane to have your kid keep count of how many times you land flat on your face? Maybe. But that’s skating. Kingsbury calls it “compulsion” — and it’s the same unrelenting obsession that built Nederland’s Nathan Lazarus Skatepark nearly 20 years ago.
Before it became the shred spot locals know today, the plot of land where the skatepark sits was just a parking lot filled with donated ramps and sign post-rails local kids pieced together. After a few years of weathering nasty mountain winters, the ramps were falling apart.
“It was just a matter of time until someone got really hurt,” says Stephen LeFaiver, executive director of Nederland’s local youth center TEENS, Inc.
Two decades, generations of skaters and thousands of kickflips later, the skate scene in Ned is still rolling, reminiscent of the hard-nosed, gritty community that made this park a reality.
Skaters in Colorado’s mountain towns have it pretty good. Nederland’s bowls come with waterfront views of Barker Reservoir, Estes Valley’s with a panoramic backdrop of Rocky Mountain National Park. There’s public skate spots in Winter Park, Idaho Springs and one on the way in Evergreen. It’s a much different picture than what it was in the early aughts.
“We would go out in front of B&F, right in that parking lot there, and we would try to grind on these wooden planters,” says Silas Tittes, who grew up in Nederland. “The public view is like, we were just grungy kids, we were a nuisance, and they wanted us out of there.”
Ned’s teens needed a skatepark, somewhere safe to skate and be kids. Despite the sport’s DIY attitude and edgy reputation, it’s still at the whim of paperwork and local bureaucracy when it comes to getting a park built.
So LeFaiver, Tittes, a band of grungy kids and their supporters packed a town board meeting, and Nederland greenlit the use of the vacant TEENS, Inc. lot for the park.
“If you give young people support and empower them and give them a voice, they're much more inclined to make positive decisions and do things that are better for the community,” LeFaiver says.
It was the push the park needed to get rolling, but there was more work to be done: The town had no money, and raising half a million dollars and navigating webs of red tape would prove to be a full-time job. It was time to call up the old heads.
In 2005, the grassroots collective of teens and older supporters formed a nonprofit, NEDSK8, and appointed Randy Lee executive director. Lee, whose son was an avid skater but had never set foot on a board himself, quickly became the engine fueling the uphill battle toward a ribbon cutting.
The organization started raising capital — securing seed money through festivals, fundraisers and donation jars fashioned to skateboard decks, placed conveniently next to registers at cafes and grocery stores. Lee even loaned NEDSK8 a chunk of change from his home equity line of credit to hire a design contractor.
“It was really a struggle,” Lee says. “We tried everything.”
Still, NEDSK8 picked up speed. With local support, organizational infrastructure and some seed money, they caught the attention of the Tony Hawk Foundation, now called the Skatepark Project, a national organization dedicated to building skateparks in underserved communities.
The town earned a $25,000 grant, the foundation’s largest annual award. With the legendary Tony Hawk’s name attached, the Nederland skatepark was legitimized and more grants came rolling in, including a $200,000 commitment from Great Outdoors Colorado.
Tony himself donated an additional $50,000 when the town agreed to name the park after Nathan Lazarus, a Boulder local who competed on the gameshow Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader? with Hawk in 2007. He promised Lazarus a skatepark in his name after the 11-year-old helped him win $175,000 for his foundation. Hawk delivered.
The park opened Memorial Day Weekend 2009 and the Birdman himself was there to break it in. “It was an awful day,” says LeFaiver. “Like snowing, and we were out there with leaf blowers to try to dry the skate park so Tony Hawk could skate.”
Hawk was trying to land a McTwist — a 540-degree backside rotation mixed with a front flip. “He probably tried 15 times to do it before he landed it,” LeFaiver says. “It was kind of like a picture of what building the skatepark was going through. Just effort after effort to do this one little trick.”
There’s a giant, hollowed out concrete orb in the middle of Nathan Lazarus Skatepark. From the top, it’s a horrific, vertigo-inducing look down — kids call it the Death Star.
Conquering the Death Star is brutal. But while it might look like a solo mission, it never is.
“Whether you fail or achieve something, people know what that’s like,” says Alec Beck, associate director of advocacy and public engagement for the Skatepark Project. “They’re there cheering for you, or they’re helping you pick yourself up off the ground. And that’s a really beautiful thing.”
To outsiders, skateboarding can look violent. Hard falls, raucous teens, loud music. Beck says public perception of the sport has become more positive over the last few decades, but thanks to the baggage it has accumulated over the years, skateparks still need a local push to get built.
“They’re not exactly grandparented in like other traditional sports might be — ball fields, soccer fields, that sort of thing,” he says.
It’s been a slow uptake for skateparks, but localities are beginning to see the benefits these concrete playgrounds bring to the community. When skateboarding debuted at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, the Skatepark Project saw a 700% increase in outreach calls from municipalities and advocates, Beck says. And despite its slacker reputation, hard data shows the sport has significant mental health benefits and is a powerful community builder.
A 2020 study from the University of Southern California revealed 62% of teens who skate do it to relieve stress, and 59% see themselves as a part of a community. At a time when 1 in 20 teens are estimated to be clinically depressed, and 1 in 5 adolescents report feeling lonely, skateboarding can be a safe space.
“It allows people to find a sense of identity, find an outlet for creativity and get out of the damn house,” Beck says. “Not only do you feel it when somebody lands a new trick at the skate park, but when somebody gets a new cover of Thrasher, you’re like ‘Wow, we can do that.’ It’s a we, not an I or they.”
It’s a hazy May afternoon in Nederland. For a moment, it looks like the dark clouds over the ridgeline are heading to dump buckets of rain on the skatepark, but they just keep rolling by.
Dave Kingsbury and his son are leaning up against a rail, hyping up Quinn’s friend Avery while he feels out an aerial over a traffic cone. Chinook West, the high school inside the TEENS, Inc. building, just let students out for the day, and a crowd is starting to form.
After Avery nails a 180 over the cone, the Kingsburys have an idea: “Jump over us.”
Two people lying down turns into three, lined up for Avery to ollie over after shooting out of the bowl, and now Avery has his own idea. Why don’t they sit up, make it a little harder?
Many of these kids have known each other for their whole lives — they trust him. After he feels out the jump a few times at half speed, he flies through the air and stomps it; the crowd goes nuts.
Avery makes it look easy, but it’s far from it. The Kingsburys know — skaters know — sometimes you have to fall on your face 50 times before you succeed.
LeFaiver has seen kids develop skills that come from repeatedly trying and failing in the park until they get it right. “For individual folks it’s had huge impacts on their ability to be resilient, to persevere, to overcome obstacles,” LeFaiver says.
“There’s times when someone would come in and be like ‘I just skated off the Death Star, I’ve been scared to do that for so long.’”
Take Silas Tittes, for example. He’s got a PhD in evolutionary biology, and develops computer software to analyze DNA mutations. And he says skating helped give him a sense of perseverance. “I think it’s probably the hardest thing I’ve ever tried to do,” he says.
Seventeen years after the first generation of Ned’s skaters dropped into the bowls, Nathan Lazarus Skatepark is still a proving ground for ollies and friendships.
“There were a lot of people that got brought together just from the skate park being here, because kids shared the same interest,” Quinn Kingsbury, now 19 years old, says. “The older generation before me was brought together by this skate park, and that was kind of passed on generation to generation.”
While the rain clouds make their way to Boulder, and Avery’s still kickflipping across the concrete, a young kid turns to their mom and asks, “When will I be old enough to skate?”
