A PLAYGROUND OF ACTION SPORTS
DOES THIS UTAH TERRAIN PARK, WITH INDOOR AND OUTDOOR ACTIVITIES, SIGNAL THE END OF SKIING AS WE KNOW IT?
WOODWARD PARK CITY, Utah’s newest winter resort, opened in December with a twist: It doesn’t have any traditional groomed ski runs. The entire mountain is a terrain park, owned by resort conglomerate Powdr. It’s covered with slopestyle lines, half-pipes, box and rail features of different degrees of difficulty for various skill levels. ¶ “They built a new resort from scratch, one that revolves around the terrain park culture, and it is very exciting,” said Elia Hamilton, vice president of terrain development for Peak Resorts, a Powdr rival. “They believed in the demand for such a resort and invested in it when others weren’t. That speaks volumes.” Terrain parks, once the domain of snowboarders, now accommodate both skiers and riders, thanks to advances in ski design, particularly the evolution of twin-tipped skis (the tips and tails are curved upward and allow the skier to more easily ski backward). Woodward has operated athletic camps for 50 years that feature BMX, skateboarding, parkour and other action sports. Powdr, which owns 11 mountain resorts, eventually took note and in 2011 bought Woodward. It’s a change, for sure, but is it a sea change?
INTO THE MAINSTREAM
Terrain riding began in the late 1980s and early ’90s as an underground, against-therules activity by teen snowboarders who would ride and jump off snow-covered rooftops, sidewalk handrails and snowbanks. They could be fined or arrested if caught.
The first terrain parks were built in California and Colorado in the late ’80s, said Michael Bettera, president of
terrain park development firm Effective Edge. The early parks, which were then called snowboard parks, were designed in part to separate riders from other guests, usually skiers. Safety was a concern.
In those days, about 5% of the nearly 500 U.S. ski resorts had snowboard parks. They continued to grow in popularity, eventually welcoming skiers with the advent of twintipped skis. The formerly underground sport entered the mainstream in 1997 when the Winter X Games began featuring big air, slopestyle, superpipe and other events.
True legitimization occurred in 1998 when the Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan, welcomed terrain park events as official sports. Bettera said 95% of the country’s ski resorts had parks by the 2000s, aided by park-specific snow cats and other advancements in snowgrooming equipment.
“It really represents a new philosophy in ski area operations,” Hamilton said. “We are now physically manipulating the terrain to keep the user engaged and interested. And in terms of designing and building the features, we’re capable of doing so many more things now.”
As park culture grew, resorts began to expand their