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What places do snow skiers think of when they want a good downhill run? Aspen? Squaw Valley? Jackson Hole? What about Jackson's Slope? Never heard of it? Well, you have now.
By JACQUIN SANDERS
© St. Petersburg Times, published January 3, 2000
PINELLAS PARK -- Tall pines loom overhead, lightly cradling their burden of snow. Winter foliage peeps over plump snowdrifts. Just below is the downhill slope -- smooth, gleaming, a snowy carpet.
Actually it is a carpet -- the entirely unnatural indoor ski slope at Bill Jackson Inc., a sports equipment store tucked into the woods off U.S. 19.
The pines and mountain foliage are wall paintings, "hand-done" years ago by the Visa credit card company, and left behind when the company packed up its cameras and cheery-faced models and moved along to its next on-location TV commercial.
The slope runs like a giant's electric sander, with the carpet hugging an 18- by 12-foot belt moving upward at a 30-degree angle. Maybe it doesn't look an awful lot like snow; on the other hand, it doesn't look terribly much unlike snow. At least it's the right color and contains no hidden rocks.
The contraption is mainly a teaching device. It provides a calming medium for a student's first time on skis. The pupil learns to stop and start, to make turns without falling down, to run downhill as slowly as feasible and then climb back up.
"It works -- by golly, it works." Leslie Stallings, mother of two, triathlete, giggles with pleasure as she pulls up halfway down the slope, skis parallel and pointing across her body.
"I turned my skis the right way, and they did what they were supposed to do," Stallings notes wonderingly.
"You did great," says ski instructor Michael Schenker. He watches benignly and then, in the way of coaches in all sports, tells her all the things she has done wrong.
Then he sends her downhill.
"Thud," she says, skiing slowly, but still a little faster than she had intended, into the waist-high padded bar that keeps the pupils from inadvertently gliding off the slope, down the nearest store aisle and into the parka customers.
Next Schenker has her climb up the slope, as if it were a real snow-covered mountain. Sideways -- one ski up a few inches -- the other ski up the same few inches -- and so on to the top of the slope.
"This is hard," says Stallings, who is 38 and knows about hard. She runs 30 miles a week, except when training for marathons, when she runs 40 a week.
She learned to ski on the Jackson Slope two years ago and immediately started to do resort skiing. This year she has skied in Colorado and Italy. After each trip she comes back for a refresher course on the indoor slope.
Occasionally, an experienced skier will wander onto the Jackson Slope -- and be less than enchanted. "It seemed faster than a real ski slope, when I tried it, a few years ago," says Brandy Lyn Viele, 25. "I felt out of control."
Bill Jackson and his wife of 53 years, Harriet, built their sporting goods palace in 1976. It has all the equipment and clothing expected, and some notable extras: a heated, indoor pool, 60 feet long and deep enough for classes in scuba diving, snorkeling and kayaking; a pistol range; a fleet of canoes; a flotilla of fishing boats; and enough tents and camping equipment to outfit a small invading army.
The ski slope was built 15 years ago and caught on immediately, especially among people who want to learn the basic moves before taking their first ski vacation. Private lessons cost $48 an hour; $64 for semi-private (two pupils). The store has six full-time ski instructors who lend a hand, in swarming customer emergencies, as salespeople in, say, Fishing Tackle or Sleeping Bags or Poison Snake Antidotes.
Henry Moseley III, 14, and his sister Lauren, 11, were taking their first lesson. Serious, business-like kids, they stood midway up the slope, facing downhill, their skis pigeon-toed to keep them from barreling straight to the bottom.
The snow (the carpet, that is) moved upward at 2 or 3 miles an hour, which doesn't look as slow as it sounds. To an observer, top speed, about 7 mph, is terrifying.
The instructor (Michael Schenker again) punched a button on his remote, and the carpet stopped. He sent the pupils uphill, teaching them the sideways step all beginners must learn. They went 2 or 3 inches at a time. A hard, tiring haul.
Near the top Schenker stopped them, sent them individually downhill in the pigeon-toe posture. Both kids took flops.
"Are you all right?" Schenker asked, and took a good look to make sure. Then he let them try to get up by themselves, long-limbed kids waving their legs like upside-down spiders struggling to right themselves. They asked no help and were offered none. Slowly they maneuvered the skis under their bodies and got perpendicular again.
Their father, Henry Moseley Jr. watched with a smile and a little pain. "We're all going skiing, and I figure this place will be better for their first ski lesson than standing an hour in line at a resort for the same lesson."
Moseley has been a skier all his life. "But I didn't grow up in an area like this," he said. "Where we grew up in Vermont, you learned when you were very little."
Moseley looks around him, at this strange ski slope, and the store roof overhead, and women hurrying by, carrying snow clothes to try on in a dressing room. "I don't know what my father would have thought of this. He was an old-fashioned man.
"He was the kind of man who might teach a kid how to handle a downhill run by putting on his skis, setting him down at the top of the hill and giving him a push."