Mike Faux soars, with his dreadlocks gliding like the wings of a mythical creature.

Rolling up a ramp, he launches his skateboard above the quarterpipe, pivots, grinds, and tears down clean.

It’s a trick Faux has performed countless times since he started skateboarding at the age of eight. Now 35, he belongs to a community whose pioneers were regarded as outcasts in the past.

On a Saturday afternoon, the man also known as Hippie Mike did a few runs at the Chuck Bailey Youth Park in Surrey’s Whalley town centre. There, kids less than half his age probably don’t realize that they have it easy.

In a previous time, Faux recalled during an interview before heading out to the park in a yellow hoodie, skateboarders were looked down upon as vandals, causing trouble wherever they showed up.

“In reality, we’re just athletes that are a little more crazy than people that are in organized sports, right?” Faux told the Georgia Straight recently at his nearby skateboard shop, Authentic Board Supply Co. (1–10604 King George Boulevard).

A lot has changed. Today, most people seem to love skateboarders.

“The next generation doesn’t know the difference,” Faux said. “Skateboarding is provided for them. The spots are here; the parks are there. There’s shops everywhere.”

When he moved to B.C. from Ontario in 1998 at the age of 19 with his girlfriend (now wife)—also a skateboarder—there were just a few skateparks around. There was the Seylynn bowl in the District of North Vancouver. Built in 1978, it’s the oldest existing skatepark in Canada. (The nearby West Van Bowl, probably Canada’s first, actually went up the year before but was buried in 1984 after vandalism complaints.)

Vancouver had the China Creek skatepark, the city’s first, built in 1979. In Burnaby, where Faux lived for a few years before eventually settling in Surrey, he made his first acquaintances in the local skateboarding scene at Confederation Park.

He also remembers Griffin Bowl on the North Shore, the ones in Bear Creek and South Surrey in Surrey, and the park in New Westminster’s Queensborough. A skatepark on Richmond’s River Road and another around Coquitlam’s Lafarge Lake were built starting in the late 1990s, when he was still new in B.C., Faux related.

According to a list by the online directory skateparktour.ca, there are about 60 skateparks across Metro Vancouver and the Fraser Valley. It counts at least 120 skateparks throughout B.C.

Skateboarders nowadays are lucky, says Vancouverite Ben Chibber.

“We were the guys skateboarding downtown, and so we were always kind of in conflict with pedestrians and security guards,” Chibber told the Straight in a phone interview. “We weren’t able just to focus on skateboarding and having fun. We had a lot of challenges.”

Now 41, Chibber distributes skateboards through his Monke Skateboards company. He also owns the Dryspot (312–8495 Ontario Street), one of two privately operated indoor spots in Vancouver.

Because of the Lower Mainland’s favourable weather, Faux and Chibber agree that the region is Canada’s skateboarding capital.

In this skateboarding mecca, Surrey leads the way, according to Faux.

Surrey provides the most lessons compared to other cities, he said. For a decade until last year, when he started his skateboard shop, Faux worked for the municipality, managing skateboard instruction and organizing Hippie Mike’s Tour de Surrey tournaments.

In 2011, Surrey opened the Chuck Bailey Youth Park as Canada’s first purpose-built, partially covered outdoor skate plaza and bowl complex.

Following the success of the park in allowing skateboarders to ride year-round with its roof, Surrey is building another partly covered facility in Cloverdale that opens this year.

Vancouver park commissioner Sarah Blyth got her start in civic politics in 2008 as a skateboarding advocate. She was the founding president of the Vancouver Skateboard Coalition.

According to Blyth, Vancouver has taken note of Surrey’s model of building partially covered skateparks.

“It’s a good idea,” Blyth told the Straight in a phone interview. “Each park is different, so we would have to see what the community wants. But it’s definitely something that we would consider.”

Surrey is also putting new facilities beside recreation centres, which means money for bigger and better-designed skateparks, according to Faux.

It’s another sign that skateboarders are welcome. “If you go back in time, the skateparks were always pushed aside,” Faux said. “They were like, you know, ‘You want a skatepark? Sure, well, here you go,’ in the middle of the bush or under the power lines or wherever it was. It was in its own area, with nothing around.”

With social acceptance, the skateboarding community itself has become more open, less wary of outsiders, according to Faux.

No longer having to glance over their shoulders, skateboarders can now focus on attaining that perfect moment, when everything seems to come together.