I’m currently on the train (first blog post from the phone) coming back to Seattle from a brief stint in Vancouver, WA to spend some time with my parents and old friends. While there I threw together a quick meeting with some of the driving members of the Parkour community in Oregon to discuss where they as a scene wanted to develop and how to involve them more in the initiatives we’re pursuing in Washington.
I’m excited today to announce the launch of Parkour Visions’ Leave No Trace initiative. Leave No Trace is a philosophy that extends into everything we do at Parkour Visions, 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.
