Why every resort should have a good beginner snowpark.
Small terrain parks are the way to go.
In my opinion every resort that even considers having a terrain park, should start with a beginner snowpark.
Why?
The reason is pretty simple.
Most of people, who go skiing or snowboarding are weekend warriors. They go to the mountains once or twice a year for holidays and their skills are.. let’s say - pretty basic.
They want to spend quality family time on the mountain, hang out with friends and stay active. They don’t need adrenaline rush, so providing a safe environment would be the perfect choice to keep them satisfied.
The video above shows a run through an easy beginner terrain park. The features are set nicely, with good flow. They don’t require anything extreme neither on resort nor user end but provide safe and fun environment for everyone.
Such environment is provided by beginner snowparks. Features are small and consist of small jumps, rollers, ride-on boxes and rails, maybe some banked turns and mini halfpipes. That’s why a small snowpark will serve the biggest group of resort customers.
Benefits of small snowparks.
Those parks have many benefits for the resort. First of all - they require little snow. We don’t need tons of snow to build small features. Tiny boxes and rails are good just placed on a mellow slope, so the only extra snow you will need will be to build ride-on ramps - those are literally couple shovels of snow. Small jumps take just few blades full of snow, so the whole thing can be quickly built, rebuilt and adapted to what we need.
We probably won’t even need a terrain park dedicated cat. Regular slope grooming cat will do just fine.
The whole thing can be pretty short - couple jumps and jibs that you can session in one run will do great, even if customers will have to ride for quite a bit on the slope to get there from the lift. We will see whole families taking detours to that park in order to take photos and film themselves with GoPro cameras. And that’s definitely the other benefit of such park - they can be fun for every age group. So expect to see not only kids, but also adults having fun in them. With population getting older in our culture - that makes it a pretty important factor. There are more and more snowboarders over 30 years old (myself included), who still want to do a bit more than just ride slopes and small terrain parks are perfect for that. If we get creative with them, they might even be entertaining for intermediate/expert riders and freeskiers, who will find their own lines.
I think the video above proves my point. First of all - it’s super hard to find online quality video from a small terrain park, because that infrastructure is often overlooked. The other thing is just listen to this guy - he’s definitely not the youngest park user, but he is super stoked on small features knowing that they’re within his ability level.
Beginner snowparks are perfect for organizing events for kids, who come to the mountain with the whole family, which means for each kid you will sell at least an extra adult ticket. Besides I can’t imagine a better word-of-mouth advertisement than parents talking about how much fun their kid had at your resort last weekend.
Burton Riglet™ is a snowboard learning program on very easy features for the youngest kids.
They work different than “regular” snowparks.
The downside of that solution is that this park will take up beginner slope, because you don’t want this park to be intimidating. Small features don’t require much speed and beginners usually have problems with controlling it, so mellow run will do that for them. But if you include Terrain Based Learning™ to your park then taking up space is not even a downside - you will expand your ski school program and attract more crowd to your resort with this cutting edge teaching technique.
Terrain Based Learning™ is a program that I have learned about at Cutters Camp last year and it made a huge impression on me. It’s basically teaching snowboarding and skiing in a miniature snowpark giving first time winter sports participants roller coaster sensation from day one.
Terrain Based Learning™ explained by its creators - Snow Operating.
The other thing is that a park like that will have a hard time to create valuable media content by itself. It’s more of a playground that is great to be able to show off on your website, however it’s not going to create traction in freeski or snowboard media. That’s why it’s our job to communicate and market it to customers, at least in the early stage of such program, however if managed well it will create tons of word-to-mouth advertisement.
Small snowparks are a perfect solution for your resort.
In my opinion, even if you want to have medium or large features, you should also include small ones. First of all - sometimes the weather goes bad and those intermediate and expert parks are useless, as no one will ride big features when it’s super-icy or the visibility is limited. Small parks still have something to offer in those conditions. I, on the other hand, like to go to a small park early in the day just to warm up before going to a bigger park just to stay safe.
Summary.
To sum up - small parks are great addition to your resort, no matter what kind of customers your mountain attracts and they’re the cheapest to start a terrain park program at your resort. So just as Smart Style states: your resort also can “Start small and go big”.
The best thing about small snowpark is that even though there is way more pros then cons to have them, they are often the most overlooked by park and mountain managers. Thanks to that - they’re a great way for your resort to stand out among others at a low cost.
Pros:
require little snow
many features can be build just with snow
no need for snowpark dedicated cat machine
take little space on the slope
attracts the most customers
everyone can ski/ride them
the cheapest option to start a terrain park program at your resort
