FRISCO — If you’ve been honing your longboard skills on the Copper to Frisco run this summer, you may be ready for Leadville’s fifth annual Blaze the Belt skateboard race, a five mile-plus time trial from the Mineral Belt Trail’s high point in California Gulch, down to the low spot in Stream City. The race is set for this Saturday (Sept. 15), with registration at 9 a.m. at the Tennessee Pass Cafe. The $20 entry fee goes toward paying for the timing chips and post-race BBQ feast, including a keg of beer. Visit Blaze the Belt on Facebook for more info.

Event organizers hope to have more than 100 racers competing in what has become a signature event for a wide-reaching $900,000  community effort to improve recreation facilities in Leadville, including construction of a 21,000 square-foot skate park that will include features suitable for longboard riders. Visit Blaze the Belt on Facebook for more info.The ongoing improvement plan encompasses longboarders, park riders and even non-skateboarders, with plans to resurface a couple of tennis courts and to build restrooms and a warming hut for the local ice rink, said Greg Race, one of the leaders of the grassroots push. It started out as an effort to replace the park we had,” Race said, explaining that existing skatepark is a somewhat makeshift facility that was created by placing some donated indoor ramps from Copper Mountain on old tennis courts.

That worked for a while, but eventually, the ramps started coming apart. With rusty screws popping out of the woodwork, some locals started calling the facility “tetanus park,” Race said, adding that the plan is to break ground on the new park this coming spring. With Leadville’s Mineral Belt trail being a bit more wide-open and less trafficked than Summit County’s recpath system, there hasn’t been any controversy over longboarding, he said. To the contrary, everyone in Leadville, including Colorado Mountain College, has been pulling together to try and improve recreational opportunities for everyone.

If you want to learn more about the Huck Finn Park Project: Click Here