PRO terrain parks
Pro terrain parks are.. magnificent. Definitely in my opinion, but I guess most park builders would agree.
Perisher has become a training ground for most of the world’s top riders, thanks to their Front Valley Park, where you can find some large jumps as well as a full size superpipe.
These are parks, where you find the biggest, nicest and most beautifully cut features designed for pro athletes. They’re built for photo and video shoots (ads, catalogues, video parts) as well as to hold contests and events. In some cases resorts allocate the whole park to contain pro features, and sometimes its just XL size lines in advanced parks. Pro parks consist of big jumps, hips, quarter pipes or jib combos. They are definitely too big for beginners and most of them are not even suitable for most intermediate riders and freeskiers.
Pro parks require plenty of snow, lots of terrain and most of them take dozens of snowcat and handwork hours to get build and maintained. There are only a handful of resorts that decided on maintaining such features throughout the whole season. Because of that most resorts decide to build those later in the season - around the springtime. First of all, March is when the season slows down significantly, so sacrificing slopes for building such features isn’t a problem. Second of all - snow cover is usually the biggest at this time of the year, so there is snow for building big stuff. The other thing is that everything else is pretty much already built, so the park crews are not as busy. Snow is pretty wet and gets slushy every day, so you can easily cut it by hand in those hard to get places.
Solden is a resort in Austrian Alps, where I am spending my 2015/16 season. Every year they build large jump for photo and videoshoots. Last year, Sven (QParks designer) designed the infamous X. This year is no different and hopefully I will get involved with project.
Few exemptions of that rule are Breckenridge (they build their proline in December for Dew Tour and then keep it through the season), Stubai (Schneestern builds setup for Prime Sessions in Fall), Keystone (for some reason they decided to be the perfect training ground for all the pros early in the season) and some other resorts, depending on snow conditions.
Some of the nicest, huge jumps I had pleasure to ride are only miles away from Breckenridge, where Dew Tour is held in the beginning of December. Thanks to that the XL jumpline in Keystone is literally invaded by pros early in the season.
As I mentioned before, the price tag on those features is pretty much ridiculous - tens of thousands cubic meters of snow, hundreds of snowcat hours are not cheap. Those features require skillful maintenance in order to keep them safe and usable. On top of that they may influence higher insurance rates for the resort or other kind of protection in terms of liability. I have been to the parks, where users had to sign a liability form in order to use the largest features. Also, I wouldn’t even think about building those features without at least one park specific snowcat. These are huge piles of snow with some steep parts and high walls - winch cat can be pretty handy too. However, a well built pro feature can get your resort TONS of publicity. You can always get a magazine photoshoot on it, have a film crew there or just take photos for your resort ads. These are the parks and features that create great marketing value and show that your resort cares about freestyle infrastructure. It’s also way easier to gain sponsorship for your terrain park program if you build such features at your resort. On top of that, as I mentioned in the beginning, most park builders find those features magnificent and love to build those. Thanks to that, you can keep morale of your park building crew at the highest level, as everyone wants to be a part of something spectacular and meaningful while working. From rider’s point of view, I also have to say that those parks are inspiring.
