Big wide ride on boxes that are not high off the ground to soften the learning crashes. Really small tabletop/roller style jumps (mainly when teaching jumping, teaching the timing is the hardest thing, so anything with a defined lip is great in my opinion. A couple of cool ideas also: In our beginner park, there is one line with a wide “dance floor” box (i would say 5 foot wide by 8 foot long) followed by a narrower longer box (2 foot wide by 16 foot long or so). The cool thing about this line in my opinion though is that the dance floor box has a clear plexi topsheet, and under the clear topsheet there are two bright red coping pieces spread 2 feet apart and straight down the middle. What this does is allow us as coaches to visually see if a student can keep their board and momentum down this corrider, and therefore gives us a great idea if they are ready to try the 2 foot wide box that follows.
As far as some other features in our beginner park: ride on rails extremely low to the ground (almost so low that if you boardslide, your nose and tail will touch snow). We also have a few mini features: a mini barrel jib on a mini quarterpipe, a mini wallride (about 4 feet tall and 8 feet wide), and a mini street barrel jump. All of these “mini” features mimmic something that can be found in our larger parks. It not only gives people a sense of transition into the bigger parks as they get better, but also makes the beginner park feel “cool”...
Anyways , I hope this helps.
-Brian D.
Peek’n Peak Resort
