It’s Friday evening at Luuwit Skate Spot, out east from Portland, and across the silky-smooth pavement of the bowl, you can see the snowy shoulder of Mount St. Helens, and above that, clear cerulean skies. Dolly Parton is twanging on someone’s Makita Job Site speaker, but louder than that is the swoosh-click, swoosh-click of quad roller skate wheels rolling up the walls and tapping the steel coping.

If it were a normal April, Loren Kaplan Mutch—a top jammer for four-time Women’s Flat Track Derby Association (WFTDA) champion Rose City Rollers—would never have come to an easygoing skatepark with her teammates, Mia Palau, 36, and Julie “Angela Death” Adams, 39, who have taken to calling themselves the Send Friends. She’d be at the Hangar, shut down since March 2020, where roller derby bouts typically sell out in minutes. She’d be pushing and juking through a wall of blockers. To be honest, it takes a lot of time, focus, fitness, and raw talent to elevate the level of an entire sport, which is just what Mutch, 28, had been doing up until COVID hit.

Swoosh: into a handstand. Swoosh-grind: a tabernacle slide. Swoosh: fakie into a cartwheel—and her backward baseball cap stays on. Even though Mutch only tried park skating for the first time in August of 2020, she’s on pace to outshine her mentors. “I feel like I’ve been watching the super-fast-forward evolution of a park skater,” Palau says, watching Mutch nail one trick after another. “She picks things up really fast. She’s really, really gifted.”