A-Rob Skate Jam rolls around again

It is time to drop in on the 14th annual A-Rob Skate Jam Saturday, Sept. 7. The public is welcome to the Dave Olseth Memorial Skate Park in Whitefish from noon to 5 p.m. for a celebration on wheels. 

Rebel Roots food truck will be on hand and MacKenzie River Pizza has donated a dozen pizzas every year the event has been held. A couple bands are slated to play and sponsors like K2, Lib Tech and Volcom have donated shirts, gear, gloves, hats and more to raffle and share with the audience. 

“Everybody just gets together and skateboards, any age,” Pam Robinson, the event coordinator said. “That's one cool thing with the skateboarding community, they take care of one another. Skateboarders are so cool. They're so kind and polite.” 

The event honors the memory of Robinson’s son, Aaron, a local master snowboarder and fearless skateboarder who died 14 years ago at the age of 24 while snowboarding in the Chilean backcountry. 

Robinson spearheaded the event and was also the driving force behind Whitefish’s skatepark.  

She said she began planning the skate park in 1995 to give her three young sons a safe place to skate because they were getting into trouble skateboarding on Whitefish’s streets and sidewalks. 

“I'll never forget going in front of Brad Johnson, the judge, when my son, who’s now 35 years old, was 6 years old, and they wanted him to pay $50 dollars,” Robinson recalled. 

She suggested community service instead.  

“My kid spent the entire day at City Beach picking up cigarette butts,” she said. “To this day, he’s mad at me for that.” 

The skatepark was completed in 2005, and according to a Daily Inter Lake article from October of that year, Robinson’s feisty spirit kept the skatepark project alive when it had trouble getting support in the early years. Robinson said she began fundraising for the park with bake sales and car washes. 

“Do you know how many cars you have to wash and cookies you have to bake to raise half a million dollars?” she asked. 

Fortunately, big money started to come her way when Dave Olseth’s parents called Robinson and gave $100,000 for the park. The park is named for Dave, an avid skateboarder and mountain biker who died in 2001 while biking the Going-to-the-Sun Road in Glacier National Park. 

“She told me the story of her late son and I cried,” recalled Robinson of her meeting with the Olseths. 

The A-Rob Skate Jam serves as a fundraiser for Robinson's nonprofit, the Plant A Seed Project, which provides snowboarding opportunities to disadvantaged youth. She sponsored 12 kids in the first year of the project and this year, she has 29 kids, or “seeds.” 

The A-Rob Skate Jam is not a competition, it is a celebration of skateboarding and life. Boarders of all ages will skate, music will play, prizes will flow, food and drink will abound.

“All I know is that I'm doing this because my heart tells me to,” Robinson said. “I'm just trying to keep my kid's memory alive."