Wakeboarding Parks Debut As Summer Solution For Snow Resorts

LukeWoodling

• June 25 2009
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Editor’s Note: Author Luke Woodling is a senior editor at Wakeboarding Magazine, a division of Bonnier Corporation.

Rick Schmitz has tried a lot of things to stimulate summer attendance at Nordic Mountain, the small snow resort he owns in Wild Rose, Wisconsin. In fact, in the four years that he’s owned the resort, Schmitz has built a motocross track, opened mountain bike trails and installed a disc golf course, all in the hope of spurring year-round revenue.

“Our snow season runs from the beginning of December to mid-March,” Schmitz says. “That’s all we get to make our income, so we’ve tried to do some things to create enough business to keep our restaurant open over the summer. Some have been successful; some not.”

Schmitz might have finally found the solution. In May, Nordic Mountain completed construction on a 10-million-gallon snowmaking pond, which will ramp up the park’s snow production this winter. Later that month, The Wake Park Project, a distributor of turnkey cable wakeboarding parks, installed a Sesitec System 2.0 cable setup over the 450-foot-long pond. On June 13, Nordic Wake Park opened for business.

Cable wakeboarding parks have been popular for years in warm-weather states like Florida and Texas. At parks, the pull that wakeboarders normally receive from a boat is delivered by a system of overhead cables, which are connected to tow ropes and handles that extend to the water. Unlike traditional cable systems, which typically consist of five or six towers and tow riders in a circle around a lake, System 2.0 is a two-tower setup that pulls riders back and forth in a straight line. Since debuting at the Red Bull Wake Lab, an innovative rail event held during Surf Expo weekend in Orlando last September, System 2.0 has created a buzz in the wakeboarding community, and The Wake Park Project has installed seven System 2.0s in the U.S. in 2009.

Wakeboarding parks like the one at Nordic are a natural fit for ski resorts for a couple reasons. For starters, the parks have a built-in audience, because the crossover between snowboarding and wakeboarding is so high.

“The kids that wakeboard or want to try it are the same kids who are at our hill every single night and every weekend during the winter,” Schmitz says. “There are so many kids who want to do it, and now they can. As simply as buying a lift ticket, they can come buy a wake pass for an hour.”

Another thing that attracted Schmitz to System 2.0 was its relatively low cost of entry. The system runs off the same three-phase power that powers ski lifts, so much of the necessary infrastructure is already in place at resorts. Schmitz estimates that he spent between $45,000-$50,000 on the project, including the System 2.0 and its installation, the construction of a small building to house rentals and sell passes, and a full program of rental boards, helmets and life jackets.

“It wasn’t a huge risk,” Schmitz says. “I’m not mortgaging everything I have to pay for this.”
In fact, Schmitz expects to recoup his expenses by the end of next summer. And that’s if he only uses the system in the wake park. System 2.0’s portability — a few people can break down the lightweight towers and the entire setup can fit into the bed of a truck — increases it’s potential uses. In January, System 2.0 pulled snowboarders through a flat-ground terrain park at the Vivaldi Ski Resort in South Korea. Schmitz may try a similar setup at Nordic Mountain this winter. The system’s mobility also makes it ideal for events. System 2.0 has pulled urban wakeboarding events from Florida and Arizona to Germany and France, and Schmitz is considering using the system in snowboarding rail jams in nearby metropolitan areas like Milwaukee.

For all these reasons, Schmitz is positive that while Nordic Mountain is the first ski resort to open a wakeboarding park, it won’t be the last.

“We are a very, very small resort and we don’t have any type of lodging,” he says. “There are so many resorts that do have lodging and are trying to do everything they can to fill some rooms in the summer. This is absolutely the perfect way to do it.”

Go to nordicmountain.com for more information on Nordic Wake Park, and visit thewakeparkproject.com for information on System 2.0 as well as full-size cable systems.