Honoring Gordon Bartel

The Stillwater neighborhood is banding together to remember a local skateboarder who passed away the previous year and wants to build a new skate park in his memory. After a two-year break, 35,000 people poured on Stillwater this past weekend for the return of Lumberjack Days, one of Minnesota’s oldest celebrations.

The festival featured a skate ramp this year as a tribute to a local skateboarder who passed away in October. At the age of 44, Gordon Bartel passed away from complications from surgery. The Stillwater neighborhood, though, is considerably more interested in how he lived.

We want to have a small-town spirit. So it’s part of that grieving with his family, preserving his legacy, doing something that you do for your friend – because he was loved by many people here,” said Paul Creager, founder of the Locals, the group that organizers Lumberjack Days.

At Lumberjack Days, there were “Learn to Skate” clinics and skater demonstrations with two professional skateboarders who are Stillwater natives.

“It took me all over the world. It made me who I am and (gave me the) best friends I have. I owe everything to skateboarding,” said Clint Peterson, Bartel’s childhood friend, and a retired professional skateboarder.

“I want everyone to get the opportunities that I have and see where skateboarding can take you if you want it to take you there,” said Nicole Hause, a professional skateboarder.

While Hause and Peterson both left Stillwater to travel to California after turning pro, they never lost sight of their roots.

As a lifetime skateboarder, Bartel helped and grew close to many other skateboarders in the area. The friend received great praise from Peterson, who described him as “the loveliest man and the best skateboarder I’ve ever met.”

“When I grew up, it was the 90s of skateboarding and skateboarding was kind of dead. So it was our little thing and we weren’t cool. The jocks picked on us and we kind of felt like, ‘We love this thing so much. So it doesn’t matter what anyone thought,’” Peterson said.

These experts are currently striving to establish a new permanent skate park in Stillwater in Bartel’s honor through fundraising initiatives.

“We’re connecting his story with the effort to create a permanent skate park in Stillwater because Stillwater is a skateboarding town,” Creager said.

Hause spearheaded the effort in her hometown, even though she now lives far away in Los Angeles. “I just always kind of had this goal of getting a skate park in Stillwater, because I knew the one here wasn’t efficient,” Hause said.

When she observed high school students skating in the streets last summer, she realized it was time to start planning a new skate park.

“People that are here that don’t skate that would start skating because the park is here. It would also allow me to improve a lot, and it would be really fun it would be an area where we could all go to stay out of trouble. It would bring skaters into the town,” said Lucas Stephens, a 16-year-old local skateboarder.

T-shirts were being sold and a petition to advocate renaming the upcoming park after Bartel was available at the Lumberjack Days stand honoring Bartel.

The skaters estimate that a new skate portion will cost in the range of $350,000 to $500,000. This is because they want a skate park of a certain caliber. They claimed they still needed to decide on the site and the source of finance, but they hoped to open a new skate park in Stillwater in the following year or two. To assist with funding some of the expenses, they have started an online campaign.