Midwest behind

C

cullen

Member
doesn't everybody get frustrated as hell waiting for snow into the late fall months, only to have a place like wild mountian, open a two run ski area with a ten foot mailbox rail sittin on the freakin ground. i know we ve all gotten pissed off about set ups on rails,jumps,pipe, whatever. it seems to me that the midwest has a really hard time discovering the ways to create a park that flows well with good setups. dont get me wrong i love living here and when the parks and stuff are up and running i still have the funnest time in the world. maybe its a snow factor or maybe the creators of the parks are old, something. at least we still have some fun, just wondering if peeps think that we are behind in park production.

midwest massacre/superpark--excluded from conversation
 
sunburst has decent flow for there hill. and they have great features. especially if you throw down before the gappers ruin the landings.
 
the thing that i dont get with the insurance deal, is why should the ski area worry about someone getting hurt on the ski hill and having a lawsuit on their hands, by purchasing a lift ticket you assume all responsibility.
 
Ya Welch pulled the whole insurance excuse for a while when its just perry worried about someone catching there skis under the rail. With hills that are only 200 ft tall its hard to have good flow.
 
one point that alex and featherstone are missing is that it is only partly perrys say with ride ons, but also partly with the insurance, perry is not just saying we cant have ride ons because he believes they are unsafe, he is saying it because it IS part of insurance....welch has strict rules throught their insurance company that puts restrictions on size of features, etc. Perry is just the person who is responsible for enforcing these restrictions, so you cant get mad at him. Honestly if Perry could know that everyone in the terrain park was of the ability to do anything, then he would make anything, but since there are always beginners and "gapers" in the terrain park, he has to be careful with what he puts out there.

And you can still sue a resort even if it says the resort takes no liability because there are ways around it. That is why we have a park crew at welch, we are there to groom and inspect everything throught everday and write in our journal that it was inspected. If you dont have someone inspecting your features and something is poorly setup or unsafe, it makes it possible for the resort to get sued. This might be what some of you are missing.
 
Yeah that makes total sense, and the hills should really let some of the more expeirienced riders help decide what goes into the park. Im on nybora and lewis and martian sit in with the cat driver when they groom the jump site and the jumps are like perfect and they get groomed before we go on them so they are really safe too. hyland and buck (i ski at these places most) dont take care of their stuff soit ends up bombed out and we get washboard after the jumps. buck has ben known for a shitty park but this year they had a few features that rocked and some that didnt. the 35 foot death gap was great becasue it scared most ppl into not doing it cause they might end up going face first into the landing, a few did, and that jump was great cause of it. they had a up-gap-down that was great until about 2 weeks after they put it in cause it got crooked and the gap got messed up. if they would have maintained it it would have been great forever. they also had a upward c that they put acrossed the hill on a platform and used it as a stall box, i rode it all morning until some gapers fucked up the lip, I also fell onto the lip and kinda screwed it up but since it was slow and i was the only one doing it i fixed it up as best as i could and kept riding. We HAVE to convince the management at all the places that the stuff needs to be groomed and maintained almost everynight not just one or twice a week, if they do this the parks will be better and safer and everyone will be happy.....man that was a long rant.
 
The midwest sucks if youre trying to get some early season progression. Events like the US Open are almost impossible to prepare for unless you actually go out west to practice. Last January 2ish, I went out to keystone expecting to slide a bunch of rails... nope, all the parks we rode in colorado were 100% up. Jon, Sammy, Simon and every other big name pro were training for the US Open.

That...right there... is why the midwest sucks so much. Marquette usually doesnt get a decent jumpline open untill the end of January...which sucks a lot.
 
wait i'm moving to washington where there's mountains and snow and real parks. sweet. but yea mn does need to step it up. we could make better jumps even if it's one jump on the whole hill they could be a lot better. and the rails set up bigger. like at wild for example a rail of the left side cliff thing would be sick with a huge drop off kind of thing. the people need to stop being vag's and get more creative.
 
God damnit thats the thing that pisses me off most, i dont care if the ppl there suck just as long as they have the decency not to sit in the dumbest places ever, who ever thought that sitting on a lip or a rail was a good idea anyways.
 
not a big fan of boxes, ang i agree with having longer rails i like to carry speed into the setup makes things easier, hate seeing swith ups on boxes,,
 
they are 8 feet you noob! any way the tiny shit is fun ling and i got bored one day so we went and shreaded the little shit for like an hour.
 
couldn't agree with you more. rails are way funner and better to ride on. only fun boxes are s and c boxes. wild had a good c box for a little bit. it was cool to spin onto cuz it was banked like pc's. but rails definatly are way better.
 
yea its weird how snoboarders dont seem that pumped to snoboard when doing it... just a thought

and i think midwest parks generally suck compare to most other places, but they have gotten a lot better in the last few years. I mean it seems like everywhere you ride has at least a a 40ft jump now, when like 3 years ago it was a big deal if any place had anything that big.
 
more like everywhere got better but wild mountain. faggott park crew dude cuts the 40ft s rail in half(dumbass) because all the snowboarders told him to. wild was sick when doug was there 3 years ago now it's just gay as aids.
 
yea but it's not sick. like the c rails are soo short you have to hop like right away to change up. the park manager this year was like no better either.
 
reason they all sit is cuz they are out of shape. snowboarding is hard on your legs and they are pussies so instead of building up the muscles they just sit when they get sore which is every other run.
 
Its the midwest, what do you expect from 200 feet of vert and winters with more ice than snow? Personally I think a lot the hills around here do a fine job of making due with what they have available.

Its also going to improve. As time goes on, freeskiers are getting more and more influence on what a hill actually does. Look at Welch, we went from some shitty snowboarder park dude who didnt know shit about what people really wanted, to having a park crew made up mostly of freeskiers setting up the rails the resort already had in the best way they could be set up, and I understand this is going to be even sicker next year.

Bottom line is that if we keep pushing for better parks, and are willing to do something for it, we'll get them eventually. Just be patient. Remember that a lot of resorts are still using jibs from back when there were only like 3 kinds of twintip skis available. The sport is moving in the right direction, its just gonna take some time.
 
My understanding (could be wrong) on the insurance shiat and rail gaps is this.....

I was told by Tyrols GM that there just has to be snow "filling" the gap so that there is technically no gap at all. Park designers on the up and up in the MW could make a rail with a 10 foot gap and fill the gap with snow if this is making any sense.

Why only MW parks seem to have this issue, not sure, my guess could only be that the bigger mountains out west might purchase a better policy.

As far as the comment on the back of the ticket (and any waiver you sign) stating the ski hill has no liability, the sad fact is that a good lawyer will find a way around it.

In light of recent events with the lawsuit at snowqualmie, even Tahoe park builders tell me they are worried about being able to make any jumps at all next year let alone big ones.

Word on the street is that most resorts renew their insurance policies in June, we will all know more then.
 
You are right but in this case I think it was a dual lawsuit.

Prime example, someone was hurt on my boat and THEIR insurance company went after my boat insurance company.......its a fuck me fuck you world out there.

Another example, I broke my thumb punching some punkshit in the teeth and told the doctor that I fell in a bar so they wouldnt call the cops.....my insurance company sued the bar LOLOLOL.

 
This was actually a good topic for a bit, back on track.....there is some things that the park riding community can do to help and talking with your home hill would be a good idea.

 
i like how everyone is hating on thatoneguy even though he isn't being a dick in anyway right now. Midwest love doesn't exist its just people hatin' like everywhere else in the world thats my 2 cents for now. i want some Pepsi....
 
s'all good Im not tripping on anything just thought it would be valuable to pass what little I know about this on and hope that someone from the MW might get some insight on what might happen here.
 
one thing that i experienced well i was in vermont was a park pass. you had to watch a 10 min video and sign a waiver, then they would give you a special card and that way it keeps the gapers out because if you dont have a card you will get your pass pulled if you are in the park
 
The only way you'd ever get a pass system into midwest parks is if all the area resorts adopted it at the same time, for obvious reasons.
 
^MM tried to use a park pass thing...it didnt work that well though... but they never checked passes for it anyways.
 
That's exactly what we did the season we had park passes.

hell, we even did it last season, when there wasnt park passes
 
I think it would somewhat work if there was a smaller park for the gapers with small boxes and jumps then have a park pass for the big park. But then there will still be some dumb asses who will break the rules and go in anyways.
 
ha, werd. ill b hotness on rails, cody will be darkness on rails! you'll b sportin the bright colored nike jacket n colorfull skis... techno on rails???
 
Park crews should have that authority already, period. Those guys are responsible for making sure all the features are safe. Is a jump with 10 snowboarders in the landing and a gaper riding over the lip all that safe to hit? Didn't think so.
 
dude we should have park passes for the big park and then not have them for the little park so the gapers have somewhere to learn. Then just have the park crews just make the big park alot nicer and take all the rails and jumps the riders want and put them in there. give the gapers their 8ft flat box and have them go sit on it fay away from us..................also if we could get them to expand the park onto the racer hill........but we can only dream.
 
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