By: Collin McKenna, Outdoor Recreation editor
Photos by: Collin McKenna
When one door closes, another one opens.
Time is a flat circle, and the end of one thing is always the beginning of another.
But that doesn’t make the end any happier. That doesn’t account for the memories, the friendships, and the seemingly inconsequential moments along the way.
Mutual Friends skate shop closed its doors for the final time on April 1. The skate shop, which had been open since September of 2017, proudly served the Grand Junction community.
“I used to come up from Montrose a couple times a month to go in there because they had some really cool stuff,” Greg Sheya, a Montrose native and current Grand Junction resident, said.
Greg Sheya performing tricks on one of the skateboards he purchased at Mutual Friends. (Collin McKenna, May 2023).
Of course, high levels of customer service paired with high quality merchandise will bring customers into any location, but Mutual Friends had one other advantage; its proximity to the Colorado Mesa University campus.
Its downtown Grand Junction location was convenient not only for those that could drive there from their homes, but it was close enough to campus that the students without access to cars could easily walk (or skate!) there in just a few minutes.
Colorado Mesa University student Alec Thudium was a beneficiary of this convenience when he arrived in Grand Junction.
“When I moved here from Arizona for freshman year, I wanted to use my car as little as possible, so I skated most places. Mutual Friends being located where it was made it so that I could just stop in whenever I had just a few minutes of free time instead of needing to ‘plan out’ a trip there,” Thudium said.
Alec Thudium’s skateboard deck, purchased from Mutual Friends in 2020. (Collin McKenna, May 2023).
Many were understandably upset to hear the news of the shop’s closing; after all, Mutual Friends quickly became one of the prominent skate shops in town once it opened.
“I was really sad to hear about Mutual Friends closing its doors,” Jenna Sterling, a Grand Junction local and frequent customer at Mutual Friends, said. “I had a lot of friends that worked there so I was there all the time.”
The idea of friends is one that closely surrounded this skate shop throughout its existence.
The shop was more than just a store; they hosted events and concerts, and they had a halfpipe built in the back of the store for people to come and use whenever they felt like it.
“I met a lot of really cool people just skating the halfpipe in there, people that I don’t think I would have necessarily encountered without the existence of Mutual Friends,” Gaston Taylor, a sophomore at Colorado Mesa University, said.
That’s part of what made Mutual Friends unique. It grew to become so much more than just another store on a downtown street.
“Mutual Friends having that space to hold events and concerts really made it different from other shops in town,” Sterling said. “People from all over were brought together, and the atmosphere there was just cool. It was just another place to hang out,” she added.
Mutual Friends started off as just another skate shop on just another street in just another town. But like its customers and the town around it, it evolved. It grew. It matured into something much, much more important.
But all good things must come to an end. It’s important to recognize this small fact in order to recognize the impact the shop had on the community it was in.
In its farewell post on Instagram Mutual Friends stated, “We love you all and hope that this is not goodbye forever, but farewell.”
I hope they know that to their friends in the Grand Junction skate community, those feelings are mutual.
blockpartygj.net 