South Jordan, Utah Skate Park

I finally skated the South Jordan, Utah park which I’ve been hearing a lot about and it is my new favorite. Good bowls, good street, even considering a number of things that could have been built better.

Photos courtesy of rideutah.com and GrindLine, the builder.

Fake pool light in the bowl. Classic.

This park was mostly built right, instead of being built mostly wrong.

The bowls have real pool coping on them. Personally I don’t mind good pipe, but pool coping is good stuff to have for a plethora of reasons.

None of the photo really show them, but between the bowls and the street course there are some banks that I think are great. They’re the right slant, and there are some hips that have sharp corners instead of big rounded, lumpy corners. Good for all bank-related tricks. And part of the bank has a step up notch cut into it that isn’t one of these 6-inch deals that are meaningless, but this one actually creates a challenge.

Where the park falls a little short is speed on the street course. I found it hard to get the speed I needed in the places I need it. For example, when you want to hit that step up gap you’ve got about 3-4 pushes if you rush them, but you barely get enough speed to clear it. If I could get two more pushes in or have more speed to begin with it would be a lot more fun without as much work.

Now I’ll tell you where this park blows any other park away. These ledges (see photo below). Yeah, they don’t look like much, but these are the best ledges I’ve ever skated in a public park. They’re slick, they’re long, the conrete around them is perfectly flat, you don’t run into other kids while you’re skating them…they’re just perfect. Go skate them and you’ll see what I’m talking about. My friend Mark was doing fast nose grinds along the whole length of one of the smaller boxes, which are bigger than they look in this photo.

The park is at 11000 So. Redwood Road. It’s behind the South Jordan rec center, by the indoor swimming pool, which is housed in a two-story gray building. It’s not very visible from the street, but the rec center itself is, so just find that, drive behind it, and there’s the park.