Skiing & Snowboarding

Adding Terrain Park Keeps More Wyoming Snowboarders in Wyoming

By Shane K. Staley, 2-28-11

	The terrain park at Snowy Range.

During past seasons, if skiers and snowboarders from southeast Wyoming wanted to ride or ski a terrain park, they had to travel hundreds of miles to resorts rather than stay at home at Snowy Range, a ski area located roughly 30 miles west of Laramie. But this season, that’s all changed.

“As far as the last few years go, whenever I was here they would just stick a rail in the ground, put a bump up to it and call that a jump,” Snowy Range Ski Area Terrain Park Manager Erik Clark said.

Since the park was built late in December, local boarders and skiers have five different rails of varying types and two different jumps--one large, one small--to ride at Snowy Range. 

Clark said that the move to design, build and maintain the new terrain park came as the result of meeting the demands of members of the local skiing and snowboarding community.

With the exposure given to freestyle skiing and snowboarding through events like the Dew Tour and the Winter X-Games, more boarders and skiers--whether they live in Laramie or elsewhere--have greater expectations for their local ski areas.

“I think they needed to meet the demand of the market,” Clark said. “All the kids nowadays want a park on every mountain.”

Over the past decade, said Laramie snowboarder Travis Ivey, Snowy Range lost out on money locals took to Steamboat or Jackson Hole.

Others might have written off skiing or snowboarding all together, deciding to keep their bodies in their homes and their cash in their pockets.

“They kind of left out a whole demographic of, you know, customers they have,” Ivey said. “They lost money I’m sure.”

It might have also dissuaded boarders and skiers from Colorado and Nebraska from visiting the ski area, even with a main selling point: affordability.

“You could get people from people from Fort Collins to come up there for roughly $30,” Ivey said. “It’s totally worth it.”

A full-day lift ticket at Snowy Range for the 2010-2011 season costs $39.Depending on the date you ski or snowboard, a full-day ticket at Jackson Hole, Wyoming’s premier resort, can cost up to $95.

Yet, diehards like Ivey and other local skiers and snowboarders took to Snowy Range’s runs. Still, he remarked on how it was disheartening to ride through the run where the terrain park is now located to see no jumps, and if there was one, a single rail.

For years, obstacles—boxes and rails—sat idle in trees along the run where the park sits. If there were jumps placed in the run, they typically were neither well-built nor adequately maintained.

“If you’re going to have a park that’s unacceptable,” Clark said. “You have to stay on top of things and always be maintaining those features.”

In contrast to previous seasons, Snowy Range now has a staff, which Clark oversees, whose job it is to create new obstacles and maintain the ones that are there. And with this new staff and comes and end to an era—an entire decade—that saw the Snowy Range Ski Area go absent a terrain park.

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