User:Skitrac
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[edit] SKI TRAC
The Ski Trac is a patented Australian invention enabling snow skiers to experience year-round non-stop skiing on a continuous slope. No Ski Tracs have yet been built, but after considerable development time, preliminary work is under way in Seoul, Korea, and in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia for construction late 2007. The Ski Trac is the invention of Kevin Ferris of Brisbane, Australia.
What distinguishes the Ski Trac from existing indoor slopes is its rotating deck, which continuously passes through a cold room or Snow Chamber covering 40% of the slope, and which contains temperatures of minus 10oC to minus 15oC. In this chamber, compressed air and water snow guns manufacture snow of an ideal texture for skiing, with a snow cover of 200mm. The 175 meter diameter magnetically supported ski deck is so inclined as to provide a slope descending from a height of 13 stories top to bottom. It rotates at speeds up to 25 kilometers per hour providing an equivalent ski run of 650 metres.
In one hour of skiing into the on-coming snow, the skier has traveled 20 kilometers over the snow, making this the world’s longest ski run. When reaching the bottom, the skier simply remains stationary at the outer edge of the slope and is taken back to the top. The Ski Trac has a capacity of 1200 skiers at any one time, or 6.5 million ski hours per year.
The deck will be housed in a large circular dome structure 240 metres in diameter and covering an area of 10 acres. This free-standing insulated dome will provide ideal and comfortable ski conditions with ambient temperatures up to 10 degrees Celsius, with no degradation of snow quality. In normal indoor skiing, the slope is only ever going to be as long as the building housing it. Not so in the Ski Trac. The moving snowfield will extend the slope way beyond the size of the structure. This major breakthrough will see the Ski Trac become the standard method of skiing throughout the world.
The snow deck is specially profiled to provide a slope of 20 degrees maximum at the top, down to a run-off at the bottom, forcing the skier to the outside edge for the return to the top. A seat is contoured into the deck wall, or the skier may simply remain standing while being taken by the moving deck back to the top. A unique feature of the deck is that permanent magnets are used instead of wheels, providing a maglev-type transportation system.
There is little chance of boredom on the Ski Trac, as there is a choice of six slopes - the main rotating deck, the training slope in the centre, the Hyper-slope through the cold room, the Mountain Run with its moguls and rough terrain, two mountain tracks, and the Snowboard Park, with its half-pipes, flat-tops and crossovers. Each morning the snow on the entire facility is topped up with a fresh layer from the continuous run-off of water, which is filtered and put through the snow guns inside the cold room.
The Ski Trac will never claim to equal the actual alpine experience, but it does profess to be the next best when no Alps are accessible. It attempts to emulate every experience on the mountain within obvious limitations. Nevertheless it does have major advantages - ideal snow, ideal weather, ideal temperature, perpetual blue skies, and it will be right on the doorstep! It will be user-friendly to both beginners and experienced skiers alike.
