Artificial Surface Slopes – A History

SPONSORED BY

The first big breakthrough came in 1961 when the established Welsh brush manufacturer Dendix, today a subsidiary of the giant Ohio based Osborn Corporation, invented its famous diamond mat on which millions of people have learned to ski and board for more than four decades since at more than 200 locations worldwide.

Invention of the Dendix ski mat, a concept initiated at the same time (although in the long term less successfully) in Italy by Count Aquaderni and the family SIT company, is credited to a Len Godfrey who was employed to manage a Dendix facility in Canada in the 1950s.

He enjoyed skiing in the winters in Canada and racked his brains for an idea to create an artificial surface for skiers to enjoy back in Britain, or indeed even in conventional snow skiing nations during the summer months. He recalled a pre-war cartoon in which two boys were seen skating around a kitchen on scrubbing brushes. Mr Godfrey reversed the idea, place his boys on skis on a sloping surface made up of something like one giant scrubbing brush and the rest is history. The name Dendix comes from the company’s founder, Dennis Dixon.

Count Aquaderni’s invention, named Quattro Stagioni - Four Seasons, was probably less successful as it was marketed mostly to existing ski areas rather than as with Dendix in the UK, to slopes where snow was rarely, if ever seen. However Aquaderni had had the foresight to patent his product shortly before Len Godfrey attempted to get the same patent for Dendix and so the company had to pay SIT for some years until the patent expired.


image courtesy of

The first slopes began popping up around London in 1961. Dendix installed a slope on the sloping floor of a disused cinema and on a ramp in Simpson’s Sporting Goods Store. Dendix was also used for an international ski jumping competition that same year in Wembley stadium.

The first proper year-round outdoor ski slope opened two years later in 1963 at a slope owned by the Wessex Ski Club in Torquay and still going strong today, more than 40 years later.

As the whole artificial surface slope idea began to take hold, more centres sprung up around the UK, eventually peaking at around 100 venues – with more than 60 still operational today.

Count Aquaderni’s invention was not forgotten in Italy however. The “Pista del Sole” was built by Francesco Cima who bought hundreds of square meters of the Earl of Acquaderni’s synthetic surface, manufactured by his Tecnospazzole company.

Plastic Fantastic

Many of the companies that came and went between the invention of Dendix and the present day thought that moulded plastic was the way to go, but few managed to make a product that has survived the test of time.

Company names included Ski Mat, Sno Mat, Bow Mat, Vango, Delta, Nor ski, Sorbo ski, Springsno and most famously the Dutch giant Curver, who have found greater success in plastic storage boxes.

One of the more successful producers from that era was German product Alpina, which has survived far longer.

The solid plastic panels were very temperature sensitive. When the sun comes out they rapidly expand and bubble up, and become very slow and sticky. The advice at the time was to lubricate with engine oil! As soon as the temperature dropped below about 4 degrees they became brittle and all the spikes sheared off - it was like skiing on sheet ice and just as noisy!

“None of the injection moulded surfaces really work - it's not possible to produce a filament fine enough to allow a ski to 'move' it and they are all degrade to some degree and go brittle in sunlight.” commented industry consultant Chris Exall, continuing. “UV light tends to make many injection moulded plastics quite brittle - a process called actinic degradation.”

That said the plastic slopes injection moulded surfaces offered cost advantages and were frequently much easier to lay than Dendix which requires a more complex system of anchors and wiring together. However these short term benefits were frequently quickly regretted and slopes rapidly closed for good, or reopened with Dendix or one of the mainstream brands as was the case at Wycombe Summit near London when it first opened. The odd new injection moulded surface does still pop up every now and then however.

However some slopes, including some of the world’s largest and most successful in Belgium and the Netherlands are still using plastic moulded surfaces today. Many get round the rapid degradation of the surface by replacing panels in the most worn areas frequently, checking the slope at least once a year. The low cost of panels make this financially possible.

In Italy at the Pista del Sole, Francesco Cima worked on a better version of Count Aquaderni’s original concept, but before he managed to convince others on the changes which were needed to improve the matting surface, he created a new one by himself using different materials – only plastic - and a newly designed structure.

Cima went on to produced his own surface and put it on the hill. He then began building ski-lifts, a chalet used as a restaurant, a conference hall and a club house. Then followed tennis courts, a skating rink and a swimming pool. The resort was completely illuminated and offered horse rides, a roofed swimming pool, curling, baby-bob, running track, ski jumping spring-board and a cross country ski ring.

Years of tests have been done on the products created by Cima they have also been used for competitions ranging from the World Ski on Plastic Championships to simple competitions for children. Unhappy with the initial results, Francesco Cima studied and developed nine different models of his product.

His great passion, his sports experience and the support of many internationally known athletes who have evaluated the product over the years, have contributed to the current 500m slope.

Across the Atlantic in the late 1970s US company Ski Ventures, based in Atlanta, launched Polysnow on the market Obergatlinburg, in Tennessee, a five acre facility, and Vinings Ridge Ski Area in Atlanta which was 750 feet long by 80 feet wide, the first major synthetic facilities in the U.S.

Polysnow had been developed by Monsanto and was a moulded product that was designed to be used as a matrix system holding polypropylene beads. It was attached by staples in the ground. As with other injection moulded surfaces the backing was not very UV stable and it wore out fairly quickly.

Monsanto sold the rights to Polysnow to Astroturf Japan who remarketed it as Astrogelande. Astrogelande remains the dominant artificial ski slope surface in the Japan – Korea region to this day.

1980s

A major new player that arrived in the mid 1980s was North American company Powder Pak, which evolved from Ski Ventures. This company created a carpeting product that you simply rolled out on the slope and off you went. So it was good for both temporary and permanent events. Powder Pak has subsequently covered slopes in several countries around the world and is still a popular choice today.

Powder Pak comes in a choice of thicknesses, but typically one and a half inches (6cm). The material is covered with a dense, non-directional pile embedded with medical-quality polymer plastic granules that resemble sugar. Once wet, the affect is for ski edges to work against it like Spring snow, according to the manufacturer.

Dry slope lubrication also became almost as much of a source of innovation as the slope materials themselves. It was formerly common practice to use pads saturated with furniture polish {the sort of brown wax polish they used to use on parquet flooring in schools) to make slopes more slippery. Next it become common to use golf course/agricultural sprinklers whereby a jet pops up from a recess at the edge of the slope and a bit like a garden sprinkler hoses down the entire slope.

The need for increasing sophistication in the modern era led to the development of under slope systems such as Britonmist. Pipes are laid beneath the matting and through fine nozzles a mist wets the slope, but hopefully not the skiers. These systems have massively increased the skiability of the surface and also the time the surface will last.

Towards the end of the decade a new twist in artificial snow surfaces began. Slope operators began to consider making real snow, or initially at least, something like it, in giant fridges you could ski inside. The first such facilities in Australia, Japan and Belgium opened in the late 1980s with a strange chemical goo – Permasnow, rapidly followed by something closer to ice shavings – Prosnow. Today there are nearly 50 snowdomes is 20 countries worldwide and indoor snow is more or less as good as the real thing in the best of them.

1990s

The arrival of the snowdome has not proved to be the death knell of dry slopes however. Snowdomes cost millions and need to be near huge population centres to be viable. Dry slopes are far more affordable and once laid, far less expensive to maintain.

The major arrival on the scene in the early 1990s was Snowflex. Created by Brian Thomas, who had run Briton Engineering for many years, working on more than 150 ski related projects, Snowflex is designed to retain all the performance and durability qualities of the brush surface, but incorporate all the safety and flexibility features of carpet. 

Snowflex has rapidly gained ground with installations at a dozen existing British ski centres (the first, Calshot Activity Centre, Hampshire in 1996) and at several international locations.

Another British company John Nike Leisure sport which operates six of the country’s dry slopes produced its own surface types – Ski Tech (similar to Dendix, with the latest version subtitled Matt 2000) and Perma-snow (similar to Snowflex and not to be confused with the early version of indoor snow of the same name but without the hyphen).

The New Millennium

As we approach the 50th anniversary of the first artificial surface snow slopes, there are today half a dozen companies operating worldwide and new slopes continue to be built and old ones renewed.

Amongst many new projects, Snowflex has built temporary facilities in the Lebanon and Hong Kong, Dendix and Powder Pak worked together on a new centre in Mexico and in Japan, the Astro surface is still being installed at new locations, with an optional new ‘tougher’ version especially designed for toboggan use. Other slopes have appeared in China, Brazil, Puerto Rico, South Africa and a dozen other new countries in the past five years so that artificial surface ski slopes now exist in some 30 countries worldwide.

The Finnish company Everslide, which specialises in artificial surfaces has successfully continued to install injection-moulded plastic surfaces, with a particular niche in supplying the surface for ski jumps. Italian business Neveplast and the John Nike company are other current players.

The market has matured a good deal in the past decade with most of the dubious surfaces of years gone by long gone (along with their manufacturers) and the survivors mostly with a good many successful installations under their belt – in the case of Astro, Dendix and Everslide – well past the 100 mark each. At the same time innovators like Snowflex are attempting to constantly improve on what’s available.

In Italy Snowsun, the company which still operates the Pista de Sole, has today developed four different products on the basis of the experience and successes obtained by the product in over 40 years of testing. The SOL/S 40 is for alpine ski, carving, snowboard and telemark; the SOL/S 60 for nordic ski and ski jumping; the . SOL/S 80 for use beneath ski-lifts and chair-lifts and the newest SOL/S T for snow-tubing

Each company naturally believes that its product is the best, questioning its competitors on grounds of cost, safety, durability and realism of the sliding experience compared to snow.

Another issue that slope operators must face, like anyone operating any visitor attraction, is that of public liability insurance. This issue can, however, be minimised according to consultants who point to poor facility control standards as the key issue in almost all liability claims. Keeping on top of the basics such as making sure bindings release correctly for the individual skier or boarder using the slope and ensuring staff are properly trained to do this may cost more in the short term but, when combined with providing full information of all possible issues to slope users, dramatically reduces and potentially catastrophic liability risk in the future.

A key factor that all manufacturers have had to come to terms with, the same across the wintersports industry, is the fragmentation of snow sliding sports into skiing and boarding and further into a dozen other options from blading to tubing. This factor brings forth challenges – in trying to offer something for everyone in a small area as well as the possible rewards of being part of a resurgence in snow sports. Indeed many artificial surface areas are well suited to these new school sports which do not require large areas to practice tricks and jumps – the fact that they can be tried over and over in the search for perfection, year round, is a real bonus.

One answer maybe the approach taken by artificial surface consultancy firm 3:4:5 Group, based in Cardiff and run by Phil Judd, lately of Dendix,

“I don't think there is one surface that meets all needs and that is why with our projects we adopt a 'zonal' approach. We identify all the user groups and then create the different zones to suit them.” said Mr Judd.

www.everslide.com
www.jnll.co.uk
www.neveplast.it
www.powderpak.net
www.snowflex.com
www.snowsun.it
www.345group.com