When I call Dirt Love owner Devon White, he’s in the middle of what he calls “chaos.” He’s just left the accountant’s office after buying a house, met with his accountant, lined up a real estate agent to sell his tiny home and found out his dog has cancer. It’s the off-season, technically, but it sure doesn’t sound like a break.
On top of all that, Halifax riders are waiting for him to finish their new bike park.
“I kind of had to push back,” White says. “Cause I just think it’s a poor representation of our work, bad look on the city, bad look on the councillor, and yeah, now I’m gonna open it in the spring.”
The price tag is roughly $90,000 once you add his $48,000 contract to about $42,000 worth of dirt and materials supplied by the Halifax Regional Municipality. For that, Clayton Park, the most densely populated area in Halifax, is getting a compact gravity playground that should keep kids and core riders busy from after school until dark.
A gravity-fed park tucked into the suburbs
The new park sits on about an acre of land, roughly 42,000 square feet, in Clayton Park. Instead of a flat pad like a typical asphalt pump track, White got something trail builders always love to see on a site plan: an actual hill.
“We have a gravity fed pump line, a green and blue jump line and then a black jump line,” he says. “It’s a pretty small park.”
The biggest jumps? “Five to six ft tall with like 10–12 foot gaps,” White says. “They’re tabletops. I wish they were gaps. Maybe one day.”
Compared with the $240,000 Eastern Passage dirt jump park he built last summer, the Clayton Park project is leaner. Less material, fewer features, but still a proper set of lines stacked into a neighbourhood that has never had anything like this.
“Compared to the other one, far less features, far less material,” he says. “This one’s there was a hill on site, so we’re able to manipulate the hill a lot. So I guess that’s kind of where I try and get more value; I utilize everything we can off the site.”
Even with the city supplying dirt and some materials, Devon figures HRM is getting a deal.
“They’re getting a good value,” he says. “I’m undercharging. It maybe gives some communities a false hope.”
Why he refused to “just open it”
The thing about dirt is it doesn’t care about deadlines. It cares about time and weather. White and his crew pushed late into the fall to get Clayton Park ready, but then…
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