Terrain parks ranked first in East
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The Streets, which officially opened Jan. 19, is one of six nationally recognized terrain parks at Seven Springs Mountain Resort, near Champion.
Joel Rerko, the resort's director of action sports, said the parks are designed to enable snowboarders and freestyle skiers to progress at a comfortable pace as their skills improve. TransWorld Snowboarding magazine ranked the parks first in the East this season. It said The Spot, with its Olympic-sized Superpipe, was the fourth best park in North America.
This is an ideal place to learn how to snowboard or ski on, over, around and under a variety of objects known as features.
Here's where to learn how to handle mini-jumps, ride the rails and accomplish a 360 degree turn. Users can sample "many ride-on features and smaller jumps," Rerko said.
The focus of this half-mile long terrain park "is a perfect long mellow flow," Rerko said. Snowboarders and skiers can practice on as few or as many small to medium rails and jumps on their way to the bottom.
This park on the North Face side of the resort is designed for intermediate sliders who have mastered the features in Arctic Blast and Santa's Beard and want to progress to bigger ones. It has medium-sized rails and jumps, a mini-halfpipe with a 10-foot wall and a triple jump line.
This park, which includes the Superpipe, is solely for snowboarders and skiers with advanced skills.
Rerko said the Superpipe, more than 450 feet long with walls 22 feet high, was designed "to provide a venue for competitions and to become a training ground for the evolution" of snowboarding and freestyle skiing." It's "perfectly located for spectators to watch premier events."
One of the latter will occur Feb. 4-5 when Seven Springs will host the Gatorade Free Flow Tour, a top amateur event in the country that offers snowboarders and freestyle skiers an opportunity to pre-qualify for the Dew Tour.
First Published January 29, 2012 12:00 am
