Published Sunday, March 14, 1999, in the San Jose Mercury 

News 

Bikers are now feeling like dirt 

Bulldozer levels San Jose course 

BY HOWARD MINTZ 
Mercury News Staff Writer 

For the hordes of dirt bikers who descend on San 
Jose's Calabazas Park each weekend, it was like 
watching somebody rip down Fenway Park, shred 
the fairways of Pebble Beach or raze Madison 
Square Garden. 

A bulldozer took out their temple early Saturday 
morning, placing decades of carefully crafted jumps 
and turns under mounds of boringly level dirt. 

"Dude," said 12-year-old Tim Parkhurst of San Jose, 
sitting glumly on his dirt bike, "I was about to cry." 

Calabazas Park, off Blaney and Rainbow avenues on 
the southwest corner of San Jose, has been a haven 
for dirt bikers for years, apparently gaining national 
notoriety among fans of the sport. Its jumps have 
been featured in BMX magazine, a bible for dirt 
jumpers. One nearby bicycle shop, the Calabazas 
Cyclery, is named after the track, which has been 
carved from the dry ravines of Calabazas Creek. 

But when the bikers, many of them teenagers, showed 
up for their weekend ritual Saturday morning, they 
found a bulldozer mutilating the sacred spot. Dozens 
of dirt bikers, most of them perched on their BMX 
cycles, gathered around the creek, mystified at why 
the city would order in bulldozers after so many 
years. 

Eric Welker, who began riding the creek 25 years 
ago, had brought his young son up from Gilroy for the 
day to fly through the ravine, including the most 
notorious run on the course, known as "Nut." But 
"Nut" has been flattened. 

"This is their life," Welker said, pointing to what to 
the uninitiated looks like a dried out creek bed. 
"And they just stomped on it." 

It's not clear who did the bulldozing. San Jose city 
officials could not be reached for comment Saturday, 
but last year a parks official told the Cupertino 
Courier that the city had no intention of excavating 
the popular dirt bike course. The city will have some 
explaining to do -- a local mother, Lorraine 
McDonald, went home Saturday and began preparing 
petitions to get people to complain to City Hall. 

"It was upsetting to us because we never had a 
chance to voice anything," said McDonald, whose 
two sons bike at the park. "These people don't 
understand the scope of bicycling and BMXing." 

Joe Grabeel, a 23-year-old Santa Cruz resident, 
worries that it is the end of an era. 

"I came down here one day out of every weekend, 
sometimes two," Grabeel said. "This was big." 
  
  
  

Published Tuesday, March 16, 1999, in the San Jose Mercury 
News 

Bicycle track loss 
defended 

Safety complaint prompted order 

BY BARRY WITT 
Mercury News Staff Writer 

San Jose officials Monday defended a decision to 
knock down a decades-old dirt bike track in a West 
San Jose park, saying they did so after receiving a 
complaint from a pedestrian who had a near 
collision with a bicyclist. 

Jim Norman, deputy director of the city's department 
of parks, recreation and neighborhood services, said 
one of his administrators had issued the order to 
"have the dirt mounds leveled off" at Calabazas Park 
in response to the safety complaint. 

But riders and their supporters aren't buying the 
argument that they presented a danger after what 
some say has been 30 years of use. 

"It's really sort of nuts if one person can ruin it for 
everybody," said Mary Cormia, co-owner of 
Calabazas Cyclery, whose son has been riding in the 
park for 20 years. "It's a very clean place. There are 
no gangs, no rough kids. It's a pretty clean-cut 
neighborhood." 

Lorraine McDonald said she believes city officials 
used the safety complaint as a ruse to knock out the 
track Saturday morning. 

"What they did was find a way to sneak it through 
without anybody knowing about it by calling it 
maintenance," said McDonald, who is organizing a 
parents group to push for the track's restoration. 

Norman and west-side Councilwoman Linda Lezotte 
said they hope to find a solution that will allow the 
dirt bike activity to continue either at Calabazas or at 
another location acceptable to the users. 

Norman said he would set up a meeting with 
interested parties within three weeks. 

"The response to the safety issue was probably a 
good thing, but the execution was unfortunate," 
Lezotte said. 

She and Norman said they regretted that bicyclists 
and their parents weren't consulted before a city 
crew bulldozed the trail. The dirt bike activity has 
never been formally sanctioned by the city, but 
officials also have never tried to rein it in, and 
Calabazas Park has gained a national reputation as a 
biking hot spot. A park master plan implemented 
earlier this decade left the biking area untouched. 

Norman said parks officials received a complaint 
March 2 from an individual reporting "a near miss" 
that day and another on a previous occasion as 
bicyclists jumped off mounds close to park 
pathways. But other park users said the problem 
wasn't significant. 

"I've enjoyed watching them," said Clara Ljepava, 
81, a Saratoga grandmother who walks with her 
sister-in-law, Ethel Ann Ljepava, and the 
sister-in-law's spaniel, Dolly, in the park every day. 
"I think it was a good outlet for the kids. . . . It's a 
shame they (leveled it) and the kids never had a 
chance to defend themselves." 

Copyright 1999. All rights reserved.