Reid Simmons stands at the top of the ramp, grinning under a helmet covered in stickers. He takes a second to readjust a knee pad before dropping in.
Simmons, 18, makes the scooter he rides look small. He gains enough momentum on the downhill to shoot up over the ramp’s lip and execute a perfect backflip. But when his wheels hit the ground, Simmons loses control, dropping the scooter and running a few steps to regain his balance.
If he had been in a typical skate park, messing up the landing could have been catastrophic. But Simmons isn’t outside. He’s at Snobahn Thornton’s grand opening, and instead of hitting hard pavement, he landed on a soft white pad.
“This is probably the best skate park and action sports facility in Colorado,” said Simmons, who typically rides at Snobahn’s Centennial location, which opened in 2016. Although he enjoys skating outdoors, “it’s not wet, the ramps are dry, there’s water available and the atmosphere is a lot better” inside Snobahn.
In addition to the big air jump in the skate and scooter park, Snobahn’s new location in Thornton has a skate, scooter and BMX park, a trampoline freestyle area, and five revolving slopes — think of huge, carpeted, ski-able treadmills — for indoor skiing and snowboarding. The 38,000 square-foot facility also has a bar, lounge and cafe for folks interested in a tamer excursion.
CEO Sadler Merrill founded Snobahn to make action sports more affordable, easier to learn and accessible year-round. By bringing the European concept of indoor skiing and snowboarding to the Front Range, Snobahn can teach 14,000 people to be more competent on the slopes every year.
Although participation in winter sports is at a record-high, with the Snowsports Industries America trade group counting 29.9 million skiers, snowboarders, snowshoers and cross-country skiers in the 2022-23 season, the recent annual increase in the number of U.S. alpine skiers is the smallest in winter sports.
Most of the growth in recent seasons has come from fewer skiers leaving the sport — 6.2 million skiers left in 2022-23 compared to 7.8 million in 2021-22. The 2022-23 season saw only 2.8 million newcomers joining the ranks of America’s skier population, compared to 3.3 million the previous season. According to a study by the National Ski Areas Association, the retention rate for first-time skiers has barely risen since 2000 despite an industry-wide campaign to get more newcomers to commit to skiing.
And skiing is not diverse. 66% of all winter sports participants are white, and more than a third make more than $100,000 a year.
Merrill thinks Snobahn can change that.
“Our business is 60% youth, 40% adult, 95% beginner or intermediate,” Merrill said. “And 98 percent of our customers say they’ll be lifelong skiers.”
Expense of skiing adds up fast
Another barrier to winter sports is the ever-rising cost of lift tickets, gear and travel, with new participants telling the SIA that the cost of skiing is too high. A single hour-long ski lesson can cost hundreds of dollars, and most instructors recommend at least three lessons. who started instructing at Snobahn’s Centennial location last year, says teaching people to ski and snowboard inside is more efficient and cost effective.
“Think about ski schools,” Colt said. “By the time they do all their turns, get on the ski lift and go back up, they do 20 turns every 10 minutes. We do 20 turns every 30 seconds.”
Former professional skier and Colorado Snowsports Hall of Fame inductee Chris Anthony also sees the benefit of teaching people to ski indoors before sending them out to the slopes.
Anthony started the nonprofit Youth Initiative Project in 2013 to provide financial support for experiences outside of the classroom, and since Snobahn’s Centennial location opened in 2016, a total of 420 students have tried their hand at indoor skiing and snowboarding through the organization. Anthony says partnering with Snobahn was a natural and efficient way to quicken the learning curve kids face outside.
By the time kids in the program ride the lift to the top of the hill and glide down, Anthony says, they’ve gotten maybe two minutes of skiing in. At Snobahn, people can slide down the carpet for as long as their legs can handle, sometimes making as many turns in a single run as most people do during a whole day at a typical resort.
“So just the muscle memory and the learning curve is accelerated by a ton,” Anthony said.
Even intermediate and advanced skiers can benefit from a lesson at Snobahn. As Sahale Greenwood tested out the revolving slopes, which are made out of plastic and can be adjusted to angles as steep as 20 degrees, she watched herself in the mirror, getting immediate feedback on her technique.
“I felt like that was the most helpful,” said Greenwood, a journalist at Denver Life. “Sometimes when I’m on the mountain, I get really low and I feel like I’m being really hardcore. But it’s not the actual position (you’re supposed to be in.)”
“With the mirror you get immediate feedback on whether you look like an idiot or not,” Colt said. The instructor watched Greenwood from the back of the revolving slope, armed with an emergency stop button meant to pause the surface’s movement in case of a fall. “The carpet exposes bad technique.”
By teaching the fundamentals to everyone, regardless of how much they can pay or how much time they’re willing to spend on Interstate 70, Merrill hopes the experience people gain at Snobahn will enhance skiing and snowboarding outdoors — not replace it.
“For the people that are considering trying skiing or snowboarding, I would say these are lifelong sports that are really life changing,” Merrill said. “Living a life outdoors, sharing experiences in the mountains with friends and family — those are experiences you’ll cherish for a lifetime. So start today.”