They’re the last remnants of a season gone by: big piles of leftover snow, scattered in sad, melting heaps, the remains of what was once the terrain park. Tantalizing to kids, vexing to management, these mounds serve no purpose other than to wither away in the summer sun.

But what if this snow was transformed into something new? Unlike its ski-run brethren, the park can live on far past its seasonal prime, in the form of a post-season park or even the site for a special event or photo shoot. Really, who needs a glacier when you have all that snow?

It’s a trend that’s gaining interest in the resort community, says Ryan Neptune, partner in Planet Snow Designs and founder of Planet Snow Tools, one of the country’s top park building firms. But, he adds, it is not something that can be done hastily. The key to building a successful post-season park, he says, is planning, planning and more planning.

“A lot of resorts want me to give them something similar to what everyone else is doing,” he says. “But it’s like, ‘you’re a different mountain—you have different systems, different water and different climate changes and machinery.’ It really has to be specific to each resort.”


Planning Starts in October

Planning for a park to remain open past the resort’s closing date must start in October, says Neptune. When taking on a new client, he likes to watch how an entire season or two unfolds first, to gauge typical weather patterns and snow behavior. Then any plan that’s made has to be re-evaluated all season as weather unfolds and more or less snow falls than was planned for originally.

The goal is to migrate the snow down the hill from its starting position as the season goes on. Snow is constantly being pushed downhill anyway, says Neptune, so that force should be taken into account and used accordingly. What you’d like to end up with is enough snow in a central base area to build a condensed park.

The base-area park location accomplishes many things: it means riders don’t have to hike up a long muddy path to get to the features if the lifts aren’t running. It means you don’t have to drive a cat over who-knows-what in order to get it to the park. And it creates an area of interest—people will notice the park is open even though the other runs are closed. The kids are going to (at least want to) climb and ride the old, melting snow anyway, he says, so why not make it easy and legal for them, while earning the resort extra revenue at the same time?

“Kids are going to come and climb on it anyways,” he says. “The skateboarder/ surfer crowd—that’s what they do. They’ll go skateboarding half the day and snowboarding half the day. That’s what they’re looking for—just a couple of hours’ worth of fun.

“It would be good to be able to consolidate down to that one chairlift and figure out how to keep that chairlift alive for two or three more weeks,” he continues. “Planning for that can make or break a season. Especially if the resort has had a real bum year and they didn’t have a Christmas rush. They could be reducing staff and still turning tickets in the spring if they figure out a way to reduce operations down to one lift.”

Neptune and his crew have tons of experience running big events that require specialized features during the season and coordinating special photo shoots and filming sessions in the post-season. If they build up a 22-foot pipe for a World Cup event, it uses about two-thirds more snow than an 18-foot pipe. If you’re going to be savvy about making that investment, he says, it’s definitely worth considering how that resource can be of benefit to you once it has outlived its original purpose.

Aspen/Snowmass has been taking this concept to its full potential for two years now, in the form of a springtime camp on the “Snowmass Glacier,” a springtime build-out of the terrain park spearheaded by park managers Greg Boyd, Isabelle Falardeau and Greg “Treeboy” Meyer.

The idea was to expand the offerings at the Snowmass summer-activities camp. The result was the realization that collecting the snow from the halfpipe, quarterpipe and boardercross course amassed more than enough snow to create a 100- x 150-foot post-season park that included two jib lines separated by a jump with two takeoff options.

It’s not easy to keep the park alive past the end of the regular season, says Falardeau, but definitely worth the effort. “In a place like Aspen, that gets a ton of sunshine, it makes late season a challenge,” she says. “Using industry-standard chemicals or salt to firm up the snow, we focus on the take-offs and pipes. Warm weather is countered by more intense hand maintenance during the day (shoveling rails and boxes back in constantly, more raking of take-offs and sides of jumps, etc.) and by packing snow around jibs at the end of the day, which saves tons on cat time and extends your features’ life.”

The camp, and all the photo sessions and events that come to take advantage of it, has “brought a lot of attention and media coverage to our park,” says Falardeau. She says the park did help generate more revenue via the summer camp last year, although the cost of maintaining it still doesn’t quite equal the money coming in. That, however, is alleviated by the marketing value of Aspen’s image in magazines and films.

The concept of marketing value through post-season efforts is one that Neptune emphasizes. “Photo shoots are what attract people for the next year and what really build the reputation of a resort,” he says. “It’s not the day-to-day operations of that terrain park during the year that the kids are seeing—what kids are seeing is the fact that they had Danny Kass or Ross Powers or whoever else at their ski resort hitting jumps. That’s what they remember most. And it’s been huge for these resorts to be able to have these springtime photo shoots. It develops their reputation.”


The Late-Season Compromise

Last-weekend-of-the-season, full-blown terrain park events are the compromise to keeping operations open past the scheduled closing date. Mount St. Louis Moonstone in Ontario, Canada, has run a successful event during the last weekend of the season for several years now, called the Down Low. Park builder Craig Burley is given the green light to pretty much do whatever he wants with the last of the snow (safely, of course) and he takes the opportunity to build the kinds of features riders have been wishing to ride all year: gap jumps, quarterpipe-to-quarterpipe, a 93-foot press box.

The Down Low used to be held post-season, but the lifts were closed and the riders got too tired hiking the park all day, says Burley, so they moved it in-season, to closing weekend. It’s generated a lot of hype for the resort in the freestyle community, has attracted big-name sponsors, and has paid off in keeping the resort’s strong freestyle reputation alive.

The success of the Down Low has sparked consideration of a post-season camp, says Burley, since there is so much snow left over after the event is done. But he fears the costs might be too high, estimating they’d have to charge campers more than $1,000 each to cover the costs of staffing and running the lifts. But given the proximity of Toronto (an hour away) and its five-million-strong population, he thinks it could be something worth considering for the future.

“We have snow ‘til July...you just have to make it work on paper,” he says. “I haven’t really pursued the idea of camps yet as hard as we probably can. I hear it all the time from the kids: ‘You guys have so much snow here! What do you do with it all? Can we hike it?’ But you have to get the numbers to sign up and it has to balance. It’s something you have to decide now [in October] to start and see if you could make it work.”

The post-season terrain park requires careful planning and consideration of all the costs versus the (sometimes financially intangible) benefits involved. If it’s a good fit for your resort, it could not only open up a new avenue for marketing, it could help make your snowmaking dollars work to their full potential. You have to like that.