tell me what you think, make all the suggestions you can. I am really angry after today so i might sound kinda down on them at some point...
To whom this may concern:
The terrain parks at Mt. Hood Meadows are shockingly bad, inconsistent, and small. This has been on my mind so much the past few weeks that I can no longer stand it. This e-mail will address what I see as the 4 major problems with the park: Inconsistencies in the take-offs and landings, issues with speed, issues with pop, and downright poorly set-up features.
Both the jumps onto rails and the jumps on tabletops, step-ups, etc. are terribly inconsistent in 90% of the features in your terrain parks. Some rails have no jumps on, just some snow piled up in front of it to make a ride-on. In my experiences today, I found that some of the tabletop jumps too, have dangerous and crooked lips on the HRM jumps. Safety seems to be very important at Meadows, and at this moment the parks are very unsafe.
Secondly, your park crew seems to not understand basic physics. At this moment, the rail island has 2 c-boxes and a picnic table. Both the picnic table and the c-boxes are impossible to hit coming up to the island because the height, shape, and size of the jumps on. Therefore the only way to hit them is from the top. But physics once again is lost to the park crew and both c-boxes are impossible to hit because one cannot get enough speed (not to mention if you hit the picnic table you just crash into the jump coming up to it because you can’t get enough speed to land back on the transition). But most shocking is the entirety of the HRM park. Today, I could only hit the first tabletop and the last step-up. I feel quite rushed in between features and Park Place is much too flat to correctly clear the majority of the jumps. Putting jumps of that size on HRM is just not a good idea, I feel that a smooth line of rails through Park Place would be a much better plan.
The jumps themselves have one other problem besides their inconsistency and that is they simply do not pop you high enough. Both the jumps on HRM and Rose City park seem to be more built along the lines of boardercross rather than park. Jumps are ideally made with a lip that gives the rider/skier hangtime as well as length, not just length as the aforementioned jumps only give. Without a poppy lip on the tabletop jumps the rider is forced to try much too hard to initiate their spin and looses their focus on the trick and is worried too much about whether or not they will even complete their rotation.
Finally, some setups are just downright bad. First: The wallride. That box on top is meant to be flat. If it is flat the actual wall part would not be almost vertical, which I and others find throws us off balance and makes the wallride downright impossible to do technical tricks on. The “wall” part should be at less of an angle so as the box on top is completely flat. Some rails as well just have terrible set-ups. Some are just buried into the ground with no lip on and no height. A prime example is the S-rail. People need to lean into the curves in order to complete the rail, but today I watched my friend try countless times only to have her tails drag in the snow everytime she tried because the rail is too low.
I implore you to consider the recommendations I have made, because at this moment, the parks at Mt. Hood Meadows are the worst I have seen since I started skiing at Meadows. I know safety is important at Meadows, but I guarantee a park with small features set up poorly and inconsistently is much more dangerous than a park with large and difficult features setup correctly and precisely.
Sincerely,
Cameron Brown
