Building a Park in the Dark

             Nestled in the Pocono Mountains in Northern Pennsylvania, is a small ski resort that goes by the name Big Boulder. As you pull into the parking lot you will notice that the mountain is not very large, only consisting of about 14 trails. You may be asking yourself why you would want to know about this very small resort. Well you will notice that once you buy your ticket from the office in the basement and walk up the staircase to the lifts, that the mountain consists of mostly terrain parks. If you have never been skiing or snowboarding you may not know what a terrain park is. A terrain park is a slope that has a series of jumps, rails, boxes, and other objects to perform tricks on. Now there are many places where you can ride terrain parks but none as good as Big Boulder, at least not in PA that is. That is what makes this resort special.

           Big Boulder's park crew is dedicated to their work and really cares about how their parks turn out. When I interview Tom Schmidt, lead park builder, he said “ We work our butts off to maintain our reputation as the best parks in PA.” You can tell that he is dedicated to his work by the way he sits off to the side of the trails and watches people hit the features and gives them tips on how they may be able to enhance their riding style. But what makes their parks different? Well if you go anywhere else in PA you will notice that there is no “Flow” in their parks. “ We take a lot of time and consideration into making sure that our features flow into each other and there is enough space to make sure you have speed to hit the next one.” said Schmidt. Another nice feature about Big boulders parks are that if you go on a Wednesday there is a brand new park built by Sunday. “ Saturday night after closing and into the opening on Sunday we rebuild all of our parks. Its nice to come back and not ride the same park over and over again.” to go along with brand new parks every couple of days, they also have a variety of parks that range in size.

Figure 2- Love Park

           The biggest part about riding park is not to ride above your skill level. Big boulder does a good job of helping you do that by having a variety of park sizes. Freedom park, the smallest park, is a great choice for beginners. After riding the 2 person lift to the top of the trail you will see that it is not very steep. This helps you to maintain control into features. “ All of the features on Freedom are beginner level. All of the rails are ride on, and the jumps are fairly small.” commented Schmidt. The next park that you may wanna try after graduating Freedom is Boulder Park. Boulder is a midlevel park with gaps to rails and gap jumps. “ This park is probably our most popular because, while it is not easy, most people that come can do most of the feature with ease.” The final park that Schmidt talked to me about was Love Park. This is the largest park that they have. The rails are 15 to 20 feet long with a skate style entry, meaning that you have to enter the rails at an angle. In general all of the feature are more difficult, but none as difficult at the set of three booters at the bottom. These booters (jumps) have a 20 to 25 foot gap to the landing (see figure 2). “ This is the park I enjoy the most. This is where you see all of our park riders busting out all of their biggest tricks. Even some locals show off some pretty impressive tricks on this park.” After see an object flipping through the air I decided to investigate it. I found out that that object was actually Mark Gessner, a local who rides at big boulder quite often. "This park is so sick, we are really lucky to have a place like this so close. Not many places have jumps big enough to land rodeos (540 degree sideways rotation front flip)" These are the people that give Boulder its reputation.

                                       

            Big boulder park may be a small resort but you can easily have a better time here then any where else due to the variety of terrain parks. In Pennsylvania we do not have the best mountains or the best conditions to ride in, but Big Boulder does their best to make the most out of it. Their hard work and dedication has gotten them a good reputation for building parks, so much that they have been hosting the Trans-world Snowboarding “Trans AM” the past couple of years which brings in pros for a park style competition. Thats right you can be riding on the same snow that professionals are riding on, and for a very low price. Big boulder is only $18 for a 3PM-9PM ticket on Sunday night. Maybe the next time you are bored, you will consider Big Boulder Park.