Ski areas compete over lots of things: who has the greatest snowfall, the most terrain, the highest vertical, or best après. While the competition can be fierce, sometimes a timeout is called and the industry goes into a huddle.

Such was the case this year when the National Ski Areas Association decided to re-evaluate its Terrain Park Resource Guide and update it for the modern terrain park world. The Bat Signal was lit and the industry responded.

The call brought together risk managers, park builders and designers, lawyers specializing in the field, insurance experts, operations managers and other industry stakeholders. The goal? Find out what is working in terrain parks across the U.S. and Canada, pool the information, evaluate it and present it in a single, cohesive document.

“The industry felt like it was time to provide some more information [to resorts] and the best way to do that was to take the collective intellect of industry leaders in this arena and to share it,” explains Mark Petrozzi, noted terrain park expert and vice president of risk management for Booth Creek resorts.

Four committees were formed and tasked with examining ways to update the book, now called the Freestyle Terrain Resource Guide. The groups were each to focus on one of three main areas: guest or user education, employee training and feature design and construction. (The fourth group’s task was the updating of the guide itself.)

The fruit of all this strategizing is to be released early in the 2007-08 season.

What you will find in its pages, says Petrozzi, is a collective effort to publicly share a selection of “generally accepted practices” currently demonstrated in the industry. It is not, he is careful to note, a set of standards designed to regulate the design, construction and management of terrain parks. It is an attempt to put good ideas out into the public realm so that they may be useful to all.

The guide arrives at the close of a tumultuous year for the terrain park business. Concern about terrain park operations as a whole was sparked this year when a plaintiff’s verdict was reached in a terrain park-related case at Summit at Snoqualmie, Wash.

The verdict, which is currently under appeal, “galvanized the industry,” says Petrozzi, and, with a general feeling that a new guide was needed to reflect the ever-changing nature of parks, the push to revamp the guide was on.

Ski areas in Quebec faced a similar challenge after a 2003 incident in which a guest was fatally injured in an on-hill accident. A public inquiry was called into the death, and the result was a mandate for the industry to examine its current practices and find ways to improve them.

Task forces were assembled, practices examined and the result is a three-part strategy currently in use by all ski areas in Quebec. The initiatives included mandatory helmets in terrain parks, restricted access to expert-level parks, and better labeling of the size of features. The last of these, size determination, is an art that is “still evolving,” says Claude Peloquin, president of the Quebec Ski Areas Association (QSAA).

Because of this effort, the QSAA has participated in some of the meetings for the new guide, to share some of the lessons learned.


Guide Updates Summary
The following is a summary of some of the changes in the new guide.

Employee Training: This section will outline different training modules aimed at management, general employee orientation (to help raise awareness of the park throughout the resort as a whole) and park staff. Getting everyone on board and savvy to park etiquette and particulars is seen as an important step in streamlining safety messages and promoting responsible park use.

User Education: This section will focus on creating a better culture of understanding and education about the park by the guests who use it. The major new item in this section is the addition of a fourth point in the Smart Style mantra: “Make a plan.” (The other three are “Look before you leap,” “Easy style it” and “Respect earns respect.”)

This new slogan dovetails with enhanced use of the “Approach, Takeoff, Maneuver, Landing” (ATML) teaching model established in the 2005 Park & Pipe Instructor’s Guide, published by the American Association of Snowboard Instructors and the Professional Ski Instructors of America.

Feature Design and Construction: The expansion of this section will focus on quality, generally accepted practices in design and construction, the principles of good building and, it’s expected, some numbers (pitch, slope, etc.) for builders to work from. There will also be an enhanced module on maintenance checklists, and new daily logs for employees. Recordkeeping has gained recognition as a critical part of terrain park management, and the organizers are hoping to provide resorts with clearer and more comprehensive templates.


Availability
The Freestyle Terrain Resource Guide will be available from NSAA, and excerpts will also appear on the website www.freestyleterrain.org. For more information about the guide, and its publication date, keep an eye on www.nsaa.org and www.saminfo.com.