Abandoned Skate Park on the Bruce Trail

This abandoned skate park can be found in the middle of the wilderness atop the Niagara Escarpment along The Bruce Trail in Waterdown, Ontario.

The Bruce trail is one of the oldest marked footpaths in all of Canada.

The trail snakes its way from Queenston Ontario to Tobermory and is full of interesting sites and great hiking along its 904 KM stretch.

It’s along this trail, in the middle of the woods in Dundas, Ontario that hikers, or skaters will find something quite unexpected, an abandoned skatepark.

Speaking with a local couple passing through, they told me that this was once to be a house that was being constructed adjacent to the Bruce Trail.

The project was abandoned and the locals decided to convert the house’s foundation into a skateable park for the kids.

In addition to the skatepark, there is also a dilapidated outhouse on the property, how convenient!

This was a pretty cool find and the story got even more interesting after I posted my video last night.

I had spotted this structure on Google maps and decided to head out and see what it was.

Once I got there I realized right away where I was, there is a skate park hidden in the forest along the bruce trail but I never knew where exactly it was, I had just found it by total accident!

Here’s where it gets interesting though, in 2006 there was something called the Vans/Spitfire Create and Destroy Contest. An article sent to me states:

The challenge: build a concrete skateboard park under stealth in 30 days, then skate on it without being noticed.

Flatspot Skateboard out of Hamilton took on the challenge after being nominated by Vans Canada as the Canadian contender in a battle that included participants from the United States, United Kingdom, Mexico and Australia.

Contestants received $1,500 each, their full budget, and were then asked to produce a video documenting their efforts. The entire enterprise, from site selection to construction to delivery of the final video, was limited to 30 days.

“We assembled a team of about 15 guys including skaters, friends, employees and people who ride for the shop,” says Trevor Rowan, who founded Flatspot in Hamilton in 2006.

“When we were planning the job, one of the guys mentioned that he’d stumbled upon a house foundation which had been abandoned for the last 20 years while doing a magazine photo shoot. We decided to use the concrete foundation as the base for our skate park. We just bought as many bags of Quikcrete as we could afford with the budget and we went to town.”

Flatspot was awarded a $2,000 prize and received $1,000 to help improve a local skateboard park.

“We’re members of the Hamilton Skateboard Assembly and have been working with the city on local parks for the past 20 years,” says Rowan. “We’re targeting the improvements to Beasley Park, which is a clean and positive place for kids to skate.”

Rowan notes that the owner of the property eventually discovered the stealth skateboard project.

“He was an older gentleman and really cool about it,” says Rowan. “There’s a whole misconception that skateboarders are beer drinkers and hell raisers. We were respectful of the site and cleaned up all of the garbage around the foundation first. He was just happy that we had cleaned it up for him. Probably just as happy as we were to win the contest on behalf of Canada.”