BEST SKATE PARK

While many skateboarders are willing to dish out $10 to skate in indoor parks with smaller ramps and a load of regulations (or illegally skate in commercial strip malls), adrenaline junkies in the know ride their boards under the sun at the Paradise Valley Skate Park. The Phoenix Parks and Recreation Department has three skate parks (including the Desert West Skateboard Plaza on Encanto Boulevard and the Pecos Park Skate Park), but the PV Skate Park has way more than the other two -- the City of Phoenix Parks and Recreation Department's PR materials list the PV Skate Park's virtues with savvy heretofore unknown to bureaucrats: "kinked snakebowls, a kidney bowl, spine bowls, a banked alley, street plaza, flatbars, grinding ledges and blocks, pump bumps, sloped ramps, radial banks and an elongated funbox."

And best of all, it's free.