BeyondInherentThere is an art to this all as you say, but there is also a science. Blending the 2 is the safest way to build jumps. It is 2014 and the comments here are the same as they were in 2007 when Salvini was hurt. Improvements have been made due to his lawsuit. I am not convinced the ski industry would make those improvements without being pushed from outside factors. They too didn't believe that safer jumps were possible, but they decided the best thing to do is be part of the discussion and are on the Board of the ASTM Terrain Park Committee for Making Safer Jumps. That is telling to me
Terrain parks have been getting safer for years. Even without high profile terrain park lawsuits there was a liability concern, and plenty of lawsuits outside of ski areas to keep the concerns up.
As terrain parks have grown mountains have found the need to make better parks and get guests out. At the same time people were learning what works and what doesn't work. People were never intentionally building shitty parks. As the level of riding has progressed so has the building side of things.
If you watched the old contests, even the biggest ones like X you can see a huge difference in the amount of effort being put into the design and construction of features and courses. That is something that was happening to keep up with the sport, not for fear of being sued as much.
IMO the ASTM is more of a reaction to what might happen anyway. People are working with them to make sure that if standards to get in place they aren't total shit.
There never will be a 100% safe jump. Yes there can be a lot of improvements, but to me most of those improvements can be seen right now. I know what a good jump looks and feels like and the same for a shitty one. I don't think the lack of competent building some places is due to not having standards. The mountain that has a huge gap with a landing that has barely any pitch didn't build it like that because there aren't standards, it's because they don't know what they're doing.
ANDR01DYou get it.
A jump can be made relatively safe, there is no way a jump can be designed so that 100% of the liability is assigned to the rider. I'd much rather have an experienced park crew than just some engineer from a consulting firm (even though I am an engineer myself).
For example, say an engineer is meticulously designing a jump line so the rider is able to maintain the speed required to hit every jump and land safely. The problem is that in making these calculations, there are assumptions that have to be made. You have average rider height, weight, snow temperature/wax selection, stomped vs. ok landing, how high on the jump the rider lands, does he tuck in between jumps or stand up, tall-t or racing suit, etc. At the end of the day, despite the money spent, it may be only marginally more accurate than what an experienced crew could design.
The rider has to assume risk for participating in a dangerous niche of a risky sport. It should be 100% the responsibility of the rider to evaluate a feature and judge whether or not they are capable of hitting it safely.
Exactly. What are we going to do, make people ski across a scale, put it into a computer and then tell them they need to hit the jump at 22.8 and have a radar gun with the speed on a scoreboard for them to see?
When I ride some mountains I see features and I won't hit them because they're too sketchy. It happens all the time when I ride gore. Maybe I'm being picky but if I really feel that somethings THAT sketchy I won't hit it.
Somebody could argue "What if they aren't good enough to determine that something isn't safe?" They probably aren't good enough to be hitting it.
Terrain parks have come a long way, and things keep improving every year. I would just hate to see anything bad happen with either major lawsuits or standards that might cripple the ability of the builder to be creative.
If it ever get's to the point where I have to talk with engineers, use a radar gun, make a model and spend time running simulations to build reasonably sized features it just doesn't sound like fun anymore.
/lots of words
