PNWPA Blog :: Archives

Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it?  Well, when 35 traceurs get together with “three brooms, three dustpans, two (very) small rakes, six pairs of rubber work gloves, and about four thousand gallons of elbow grease”, gathering up 21 bags of trash from a favorite training ground doesn’t feel like quite as much work.

Rochester Parkour held their first Leave no Trace/ Beginner’s Parkour Workshop earlier this month at Manhattan Square Park in Rochester, New York. It was a smashing success, drawing out a humongous crowd to not only learn about Parkour, but also spend time cleaning up their training environment. Read more about it at their blog!

We’re thrilled that so many communities lately have been embracing the Leave No Trace idea and integrating it into their jams. This is something that is really important for Parkour in the long term and really just comes down to common sense. Has your scene been teaching about LNT? Let us know in the comments!

Jeremy and I just had a great meeting with a nice District Crew Chief from Seattle Parks and Rec at Cowen Park. We learned a lot about the inner workings of park maintenance, park history, park volunteering, and the process needed to fund and build a parkour specific play structure.

We’ll now be able to take back the things we learned about Cowen to the WAPK community (what is safe for training and what is not), add more opportunities for volunteer work for our members (in the loose sense of the word since we haven’t opened membership yet), and followup with the Recreation folks to see what sort of classes, events, and structures we could help get going there!

I’m excited today to announce the launch of PNWPA’s Leave No Trace initiative. Leave No Trace is a philosophy that extends into everything we do at PNWPA, most importantly into our training. It means, simply, that we respect and preserve our training grounds before, during, and after training. It’s a philosophy that Janine (pax) and several great traceurs have been promoting for over a year and which recently has taken hold of the whole North American scene under the Leave no Trace name. It drives our clean-up efforts at local training grounds, is featured prominently in our community outreach efforts, and is becoming a cornerstone of our Parkour classes.

In practical terms, Leave No Trace is both about advocacy and personal responsibility. It means that you as the traceur are respectful of property and don’t leave smudge marks from your shoes on a park wall, and it means that together we advocate for shoe manufacturers to develop non-marking shoes. It means that you as the traceur know which equipment in your local playground can handle your high-impact Parkour practice, and it means that together we work with playground designers and suppliers to install equipment that adults can use too.

You can find detailed information on the Leave No Trace project page where we outline the specific steps that every traceur should take to keep Parkour safe and unregulated. As we continue to develop advocacy plans we’ll update the project page. In the mean time we welcome your feedback and ideas.