• James Buck
• Katie Lawson

Joanna Alpizar glided across the floor of Talent Skatepark in Burlington wearing lavender roller skates, a Yoshi-themed sundress (from Super Mario World), red lipstick, kneepads, wrist guards and the mandatory helmet. Later that night, she switched to her high-heeled rainbow skates "just to keep it interesting," she said.

For their weekly skate outing, Alpizar and her husband, Mark, brought their kids — Sonia, 6, and Carlitos, 4 — who, despite a few slips and falls, cruised confidently around the room. Sonia, who's been skating since she was 20 months old, zoomed fearlessly over a small ramp, which her father dutifully avoided. "She's a lot closer to the ground than I am," Mark said.

Katie Lawson zipped by in a green skirt, pink glasses and pigtails. A terrain park skater riding old-school quad skates, she soared to the top of a ramp, paused briefly and then descended backward, deftly slaloming around a solo dance skater turning pirouettes nearby.

I visited Talent on a recent Monday night to check out northern Vermont's budding roller skating scene. Most days, the indoor terrain park is the unchallenged domain of skateboarders grinding rails, popping ollies and pulling toe grabs on the quarter pipe. But last year, Hannah Wood, the nonprofit skate park's executive director, decided to yield the floor one night a week to roller skaters only.

"It's such a great group," Wood said. "They all respect each other, and they're having fun doing their thing."

After years of dormancy and shuttered rinks, roller skating is once again having a moment as Vermont's diverse and far-flung skaters find one another and forge a community. Whether they're into dance skating, park skating — riding terrain park features such as ramps, bowls and rails — roller derby or just circling a rink on a pair of quads, the wheels are turning, and their numbers are growing. Now, their biggest obstacle — other than dogs, bicycles and baby strollers on the Burlington bike path — is finding a suitable place to skate, especially during the winter.

• James Buck
• Joanna Alpizar's rainbow skates

"The dream is to have an indoor rink, but we'll start here first," said Alpizar, founder of Vermont Skate Society, a loose affiliation of roller skaters of various styles and abilities. "I love that we have Talent. I so love it! But it's once a week for only two hours, and that doesn't work for everybody. And not everybody has roller skates," she added, referring to Talent's lack of rentals.

Roller skating in Vermont has been cycling in and out of popularity for decades. Because the state has long winters and more dirt roads than asphalt, interest in the sport has waxed and waned with the availability of indoor rinks.

Burlington's Ethan Allen Park once had a roller rink, which opened in the 1950s. Wood, who founded Talent in 2001 as a for-profit skate park in South Burlington, grew up skating at Broadacres Roller Rink in Colchester, which operated from 1974 to 1985. It's now a bingo parlor.

Alpizar, 37, also grew up roller-skating in her hometown of Long Beach, Calif. After she and her husband moved to Vermont in July 2020 for Mark's job as music director of the Vermont Youth Orchestra Association, she needed a winter activity that "brought me joy and felt like home," said Alpizar, now a violinist with the Vermont Philharmonic.

• James Buck
• Brendan Rooney

"Personally, this has definitely helped with my wintertime blues," she continued. "I'm from sunny California. This [cold] is not normal for me!"

Alpizar started by putting a few friends on roller skates, then formed a mothers' group that skated weekly. As interest grew, she partnered with other local skate groups such as Joy Riders VT, a new BIPOC skate club in Burlington.

"For me, skating is joy. It's wellness," said Joy Riders founder Alicia Taylor, who sported a pair of gold quads with wheels that lit up as they turned. Unlike inline skates, which have a row of wheels down the center like the blade of an ice skate, quads have two sets of side-by-side wheels in the front and back. Taylor, 40, grew up in Jeffersonville and has fond memories of outings to Skateland, a Williston roller rink that operated from 1977 to 2001. Skateland reopened in Essex Junction under new ownership in 2014 but closed just three years later.

Taylor, who now has kids ages 9 and 5, suggested that if a new rink were to open today, it would fare better, given the huge resurgence of roller skating sparked by the pandemic.

• James Buck
• Alicia Taylor

In March, Joy Riders held its first event, at Burlington's CORE Community Center, which drew more than 45 people. Though many of the participants had never skated before and didn't own skates, Alpizar and Taylor brought their loaner library of 22 pairs.

"For us, the biggest barrier is money," Taylor said.

Clearly, public interest is there. Last November, Vermont Skate Society held its first disco skate night at Talent, complete with a DJ, lights and a disco ball. It's since become a monthly event, held outdoors during the warmer months. A disco night at an outdoor rink in Bristol attracted more than 50 skaters. When the event happens indoors — such as the Halloween Roller Disco on October 28 — it invariably sells out within hours of tickets going on sale, Alpizar said, largely because Talent can accommodate only 30 skaters.

As I donned my helmet, wrist guards and 1980s vintage Rollerblades, I was surprised to find that I was the only inline skater present — and that my skates were older than most of my fellow skaters, who were in their twenties and thirties and newer to the sport.

"I didn't really learn to skate until three years ago, when I was like, I need something to do in the middle of the shutdown," said Jessica Cole, a Mississippi native. After sampling inline skates and not liking them, Cole, 26, switched to quads, largely because she wanted to try roller derby. She now skates several nights a week with the Green Mountain Roller Derby at Champlain Valley Exposition in Essex Junction.

Lawson, the park skater, took up the sport in 2019. The 25-year-old, who often goes by her Instagram handle, katie.skaties, said she watched a few videos of women park skating and thought, "That looks like something I can do." When she's not working as a nurse at the University of Vermont Medical Center, Lawson manages Community in Bowls Vermont, the local chapter of an international roller skating organization.

So why does she prefer quads over inline skates?

"They're cuter," Lawson said with a smile.

The skaters' search for a larger venue is ongoing. Lawson said she's considered asking permission to skate in vacant warehouses, supermarkets and department stores. Hello, Sears?

Jill Quackenbush took a different tack. She and her husband moved to Vermont last year from Portland, Ore., which has a huge skate community, she said. The couple chose Bristol partly because it has an outdoor skate park. She's now working on a project to build an outdoor concrete skate park in Middlebury.

• James Buck
• Joanna Alpizar and her daughter, Sonia

Other efforts are just getting rolling. Earlier this year, Alpizar and her crew organized to get a designated roller rink at the FRAME, the steel remnants of the Moran Plant on Burlington's waterfront. After launching an online petition, Vermont Skate Society and Joy Riders collected more than 300 signatures in support of the rink.

If and when a new rink opens, it's likely to draw skaters from around the state. Though most of the 20 or so I saw at Talent on that Monday night live in Chittenden County, Sarah Preece, 36, drove nearly two hours from her home in Killington, as she does every week or two.

Preece, who works as an outdoor guide and teaches skiing and mountain biking, was riding Talent's ramps as confidently as any of the other skaters. Yet she said she'd never been on roller skates until about a year and a half ago.

It hasn't been all fun and games. "I actually broke my arm skating last year," she said.

For her part, Alpizar wears a helmet and pads religiously, especially wrist guards. As concertmaster of Vermont Philharmonic, she can't afford a fracture.

"My hands are always at risk," she said. "But I've been skating since I was a kid and as long as I've been a violinist."