Colorado Initiatives

Members of the Parkour Parks Projekt were formally introduced to management in Denver Parks & Recreation 4 years ago. At that time we learned about tentative plans around including parkour elements in a future stage of the Paco Sanchez Park “Re-Imagine Play” project, as well as ways to show community interest in public parkour spaces.

Since then, the Colorado parkour community has continually hosted “leave no trace” jams at front range parks, cleaning up trash in the parks. A petition for a parkour park in Denver gained 500+ signatures. We have also voiced the community’s desires at multiple DPR Public Workshops. In 2019, a community led parkour demonstration was held at Skyline Park for DPR, showcasing how existing park elements have been repurposed as training grounds for parkour. In support of maintaining the important legacy Skyline Park carries for the parkour community, we have also gathered multiple letters of support from parkour organizations and businesses, emphasizing the importance for parkour parks for this vibrant community.

We will continue our efforts to engage with the city of Denver, and we will now be reaching out to the surrounding suburbs as well.

Current Action Items

Please join Denver Parks & Recreation for the third (and final) public meeting for the Outdoor Adventure and Alternative Sports Master Plan to see how your input in prior surveys and meetings has shaped the plan!

Skyline Park

Known to parkour practitioners as “Cat Fountain”, the fountains at Skyline Park have been repurposed as a training spot of cultural significance to the parkour community for over a decade. Since 2007, Skyline Park has served as the main attraction for annual national parkour gatherings, which have drawn hundreds of attendees. These “jams” at Skyline connected practitioners across the country, building life-long friendships and directly contributing to the creation of many parkour organizations and small businesses. Today the fountains still serve as a popular meetup spot for the community, and their design inspires practitioners and passersby alike to move!

Updates

DPR and the contracted design company are currently in the initial design phase for the park renovation. Sign up for our newsletter to be informed about the next Skyline Park Public Workshop where they will unveil initial design concepts.

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“It’s only when people are inside my designs and move through them that my design has any meaning. It’s not what the design looks like that I am interested in; it is what it does to the people in it – how it interacts with them.”

– Lawrence Halprin, Designer of Skyline Park

Parkour Demo
for DPR

In October 2019, we were given the opportunity to present to Denver Parks & Recreation how the Colorado parkour community trains using the fountains of Skyline Park. We had roughly 20 attendees, despite the demonstration being scheduled for a Thursday afternoon. Parkour practitioners who showed up included young adults, teenagers, 40+ year olds, and families with young children – all training in harmony. This demonstration showcased how parkour is widely accessible to all demographics, and how parkour parks can uniquely facilitate intergenerational play.

Letters of Support

Upon hearing of the Skyline Park renovation, leaders of the parkour community across the nation joined together to formalize their support for not only preserving Skyline Park as a place of cultural heritage for parkour, but also to voice support in general for public parkour parks in Colorado. We received letters of support from all of the national parkour organizations and parkour gyms across the front range.

Denver Parkour Park Petition

500+

DPR’s advice from our first meeting with them 4 years ago was to show them quantifiable interest in parkour within Denver. This petition was created shortly thereafter and circulated around the community, quickly gathering 500+ signatures. You can visit change.org to see the results.

See the Petition

Colorado Parkour Gyms

Colorado contains one of the most vibrant and active parkour communities in North America. To meet the popular demand, a variety of parkour gyms have opened all across the state, and many gymnastics gyms now run parkour programs.