Ride Utah Blog

The best battle it out for their spot on the U.S. Olympic Team.

Utah’s Park City Mountain Resort late last week opened its Eagle Superpipe, Pick ‘N Shovel and Jonesy’s terrain parks in time for the holiday season.

“The cold temperatures we’ve received over the last few weeks have been great for snowmaking, superpipe and terrain park building,” said Jeremy Cooper, Park City Mountain Resort’s new terrain park manager. “We’ve spent endless man hours building the pipe and park over the last few weeks to provide the best possible product for potential Olympians who will use our pipe as a training ground for the 2010 Winter Games.”

Park City Mountain Resort’s Eagle Superpipe is the first and largest Superpipe to open in Utah for the 2009-10 season. The historic pipe, where U.S. athletes swept the men’s podium and won gold in the women’s event during the Salt Lake City Olympics in 2002, will entertain the masses with Olympians again. The U.S. Snowboarding Grand Prix makes its final stop at Park City Mountain Resort for back-to-back night competitions, Jan. 22-23, after which the winners will be crowned and the 2010 U.S. Snowboarding Olympic halfpipe team will be named.

Pick ‘N Shovel terrain park, located at the base of the resort, has intermediate to advanced features including five jumps ranging from 30 to 50 feet and up to ten jib features. Jonesy’s terrain park, located off the Bonanza lift, is suited for beginner to intermediate terrain park users and includes ten features.

The PayDay terrain park will remain open with jib features for the remainder of the season. Beginning Christmas Day the PayDay jib park will be lit for night skiing.

Here’s some footage from the Intelligent Design contest at PCMR.  Music is by Salt Lake’s own Tolchock Trio.  Check them out on TolchockTrio.net.

Also, here is some much better footage prepared by Park City Television.

Today I went to the Intelligent Design contest at Park City Mountain Resort.  I got bored of the standard half-pipe contest a while ago, so, when I heard about this combo contest I decided to go check it out.  The Park City crew did a fantastic job of transforming the park for this one of a kind contest.  Basically, the course started with a big air jump, into a gap jump to a hip, then a couple of rails that led into the superpipe, which was freshly adorned with some jibs on the deck and then finally at the base of the pipe there was a 25 foot quaterpipe.  It was a lot of fun watching these guys mix it up and put together a real run.  Here are a few pics and I’ll have a video together in the next couple days.

The Big Air Jump

Shaun White Spinning to win

The Gap to Hip

Guess who won?

1 Shaun White $20,000
2 Charles Reid 90.00 $10,000
3 Luke Mitrani $6,000
4 Gjermund Braaten $5,000
5 Wyatt Caldwell $3,000
6 Joe Eddy $2,000
7 Sage Kotsenburg $1,000
8 Tim Humphreys $1,000
9 Sebastien Toutant $1,000
10 Louie Vito $1,000
11 Jack Mitrani
12 Madison Ellsworth
13 Scotty Arnold
14 Alex Sherman
15 Nick Russell
16 Aaron Bittner
17 Derek Johnson

Rising from the ashes of the World Superpipe Championships, Park City Mountain Resort is taking the contest to the next level this season. On March 7, 2009 witness the birth of Intelligent Design, a hybrid slopestyle / Superpipe contest. My sources tell me that the contest will consist of rails, jibs, and jumps in the upper section and leading into the superpipe for the lower section. Sounds like my usual night riding runs at Brighton. With this new format and layout the organizers are seeing a variety of pros showing interest in the contest, including Mark Frank Montoya, Travis Rice, and Shawn White. Of course a $50k prize purse helps too!

Here’s what the PCMR website says about the new contest:

PCMR: The Intelligent Design (n.)

1. a competition with a progressive approach to terrain park design
2. changes of the molecular elements in terrain park structure
3. a smart snowboarding course

The Intelligent Design at Park City Mountain Resort will combine all elements of competitive snowboarding including big air, half-pipe and jibbing in one course. The event will be located at the Pick ‘N Shovel Terrain Park and Eagle Superpipe, which will be transformed to host the new competition creation.

For more details on this contest go here: http://www.parkcitymountain.com/idpc/