Park City, Utah - 8/17/2010 - Olympic Park

One of the highlights of the Utah trip was a visit to the Olympic Park, site of some of the events of the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics of 2002. This location serves as a training facility for ski jumping, aerials, and sledding events like bobsled, luge and skeleton.

As you come in off the main road, you can see the ski jump hills carved into the side of the mountain.

Near the larger ski jump hills, there are a number of practice runs for aerials, the X-Games-ish combination of ski jumping and gymnastics, with twists and spins. In the summer, they can practice using slick plastic ramps and landing in pools of water. This is a safety feature while they work on perfecting their landings, water being softer than...well...just about anything else.

One of the coolest parts of the Park was the bobsled run. In the summer, modified bobsleds were open to the public as a ride. Professional drivers guided a 4-man sled down the concrete track with three passengers. The summer sleds were on wheels (not blades), and had roll bars and other safety features, but a run down the track still took about one minute, travelled at speeds of 70 mph, and created up to 4G forces in the curves. Park City is one of only two places in the world where civilians can ride a real bobsled track (Torino Italy being the other). Unfortunately, not being very good on twisty-turny amusement park rides, I sat out the bobsled ride. No guts, no glory... Oh well.

The top of the bobsled run. In winter, this super-smooth concrete would be covered with a very thin layer of ice and the sleds would run on blades. Parts of the same track were also used for luge and skeleton.

The view of the ski jumps from the base of the landing area. The cables overhead are the zipline. The zipline extended from a platform well above the top of the big hill to well beyond the bottom of the landing area. To ride the zipline, you were strapped into a harness seat and turned loose at the top, riding the cable to the bottom. I did do this! It was momentarily terrifying at the beginning when the chute doors first popped open at the top and the whole valley opened up before you, but it was unbelievably exhilarating.

Riders on the zipline.

Certainly not to be taken for granted, the view of the South Snyderville Basin from Olympic Park was amazing... As an aside, I grabbed a geocache hidden near turn 11 of the bobsled run, which at a little over 7,000 feet elevation turned out to be my highest cache yet.

The group had a great day hanging out on the mountain. It is always nice when there is time at a meeting like this to mix in a nice group activity, and this was one of the better ones I have ever been at.