Inline Skating in Guilford County, NC: Parks & Recreation Website Includes Skaters (as Athletes!) Rollerblading

eebee's picture
Submitted by eebee on Sat Mar 8 2008 5:30pm
0

The Guilford County Parks and Recreation webpage has icons you can check if you're searching for a local park with a particular feature, e.g., paved trails, disc golf, horse-riding trails, etc. They have some very specific little icons, and the skater looks a little out of control, but I'm happy that my chosen sport is included here. Get this: they've even lumped skaters in under the 'Athletic' category, and not in the 'playground' section. Yay. The 'open-play fields' icon looks like it contains a cowboy and a cheerleader, but how cool that the county is keeping the idea of open playing fields alive. Where I live, ya gotta pay to play on any field.

The skater image would appear to encompass everybody else who wants a paved trail, such as scooter riders, skateboarders, or even joggers who don't want to turn their ankles over on uneven grass.

By contrast where I live, the local Parks & Rec website specifies skate park facilities, but divulge no particulars about parks with paved trails. This is a shame because there are plenty of them, but not every park has a skateable trail. I don't need this information myself, but newcomers or newskaters might.

Location

Piedmont Pkwy
Greensboro, North Carolina
United States
36° 3' 13.4784" N, 79° 57' 13.0104" W
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Comments

timv's picture

Gibson Park, Jamestown, NC

Submitted by timv on Sat Mar 8 2008 6:00pm.
Nice catch, eebee! And Gibson Park, one of the two locales returned when the skating box is checked, looks like it could be worthwhile to check out. It's actually about .5 mile closer to home for me than Bur-Mil Park, not out of the way at all. If memory serves that wouldn't be far from the section of the Bicentennial Greenway that we skated a time or too back circa the turn of the century. It'd be interesting to see what's there, and whether it might hook up with anything.
eebee's picture

I had been searching for a flat oval

Submitted by eebee on Tue Mar 11 2008 7:05pm.

I had actually been searching to see if any of the Guilford County or Greensboro parks had been outfitted with any flat oval-type tracks. There's also the Greensboro parks & rec page, separate from the County. As far as I can tell, there aren't any tracks like I have seen springing up in my county around the football fields. I'm not complaining at all, but I've been on the look out for something flat and closed-off from cars in the GSO area as an alternative to Country Park, simply because a skate at Country Park is always a form of hill training for me. There's a place for endless, flat skate circles in my life as a vacation from vigilance or for more controlled interval training.

I was pleasantly surprised to find another annex to the existing Lenora Park here in Gwinnett County, GA, where they had put in a paved oval around the outside of the new football field. It's too far for me to drive on a weeknight, but it worked out well during down time at my son's baseball tournament at the fields across the street. That section of Lenora Park was like Saturday, in the park, I think it was the fourth of July-y-y-y. It was energizing but packed and therefore unskateable. Unlike the flat oval at Bay Creek Park in Grayson, Lenora Park's track was uphill one side, down the next, but there was hardly anybody else over there so I had the whole thing to myself.

I will keep searching. Sometimes it's worth 'swinging by' an existing park - you never can tell from the 5 year old satellite images, or comatose webpages whether they've made any physical improvements or not. When I got home I searched on line for official brag info about Lenora Park's new annex and found nothing.

roadskater's picture

Adding Skate Places

Submitted by roadskater on Wed Mar 12 2008 2:51pm.
Great info on Lenora Park. It was exciting to hear they updated the facilities there, and especially that it was set apart from the rest of the park enough that it was not so crowded. Also, don't hesitate to start a new article when mentioning a new skate or bike or other exercise place. It's worth it to create a new article if you feel up to it. I should have done that with the Gibson Park material, I think. (I can prune & graft this later perhaps.) That way we can specify the lat long info for each park and give it a new searchable title and all that. That way people searching for an update on that park may find our updates instead of or in addition to whatever the parks and recreation people get around to...or don't get around to...updating. Having a lat long also may help people find relevant material by way of the "content map"... http://roadskater.net/index.php?q=map/node Thanks for adding useful info and discussion on this. I need to go up to Horse Pen Creek Devastation Road to look at that multiplex of sports fields and star-blocking lights to see if they put in a trail or track there.
roadskater's picture

You Go, Skater Icon!

Submitted by roadskater on Sat Mar 8 2008 9:42pm.
Sweet. We're on a thin schedule of reinforcement. The least bit of acknowledgment and respect thrills us to no end. It's good to be grateful to be skateful(tm). Ha! As I recall the trail near Gibson Park is tricky, twisty and a bit hilly, especially starting from the end of the road parking lot in the park http://maps.google.com/?q=&t=h&ll=36.030048,-79.94376&z=18 A flatter, closer to Greensboro section of trail with a parking lot in on Piedmont Parkway, which also has some interesting roads that work for weekend skating as I recall. We used to skate from there some, it's true. It was a wet season then, perhaps, or the trail is situated poorly (running along a stream often) and the trail was often muddy...too muddy for skate wheels and bearings to really enjoy. http://maps.google.com/?&q=&ll=36.053744,-79.953614&t=h&z=18 The old north end, I believe, went all the way up to Gallimore Dairy Road, but it may not actually connect from Regency Rd...I seem to recall using other roads to get up to Gallimore Dairy Road or Chimney Rock Road...hard to tell from the cloudy images... http://maps.google.com/?&q=&ll=36.030091,-79.94368&t=h&z=18 The southern end of the paved path went all the way down to the golf course on Old Fork Road, but with a diversion left (going south) to the east to extend the distance to a crossing of East Fork Road, where at the time it returned to cinder, so to speak. This unpaved path led to and beyond the Piedmont Environmental Center, where it may have become paved path again, I'm not sure. http://maps.google.com/?&q=&ll=36.009343,-79.942596&t=h&z=18 I'd be up for a recon skate with some shoes on our backs and with GPS and photo equipment some sunny not windy perfect day! More to say...another day. [I added the parking lot at Piedmont Parkway as a map pin, since it is a relatively flat access area to a short section north, still accessing a longer section south past Gibson Park down to East Fork Road.]
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