DC Mountain Lab
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The DC Mountain Lab is a private snowboard park in Park City, Utah, known as a research and demo center. The property is taken up mostly by the snowboard park, but there is also a house there. It is owned and operated by DC. Its 22 acres are home to kickers, boxes, and rails galore. The Lab has its own snowcat for building jumps and grooming the park. It also has snowmobiles and dirt bikes. The Mountain Lab was the location of the snowboard video MTN. Lab, and it also serves as a second home for DC co-owner and founder Ken Block and his family.
The Mountain Lab features many possible activities. The snowboard park that composes the front yard is the main feature, but houseguests can also try their hand at skeet shooting, ping-pong, DJing, and playing video games on the custom Mountain Lab Xbox, and admiring Ken Block’s vintage snowboard collection. The collection features snowboards from all eras of snowboarding, spanning from the very start to the present cutting-edge boards. The snowboarders don’t have to ride only park if they don’t want to, they can take some of the snowmobiles into the backcountry and ride powder, or ride powder in the parts of the Mountain Lab that haven’t been, or can’t be, groomed.
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[edit] Features
The Mountain Lab has many custom-made features that were made specifically for the Mountain Lab by Chris “Gunny” Gunnarson and the Snow Park team, a renowned team of snowboard park designers. Signature features include a box that runs through the living room of the house, a wallride at the end of the run, a staircase complete with handrails, a large pink disarmed missile, and two road gaps set up in a line. More traditional features include a down rail, a down flat down rail, a large C rail, a hollow trailer that houses a jump, various flat boxes, a tabletop jump, and a hip transfer.
[edit] Location
The Mountain Lab is located in Park City, Utah. The annual snowfall is 355 inches (skiparkcity.net).
[edit] Visiting Possibilities
The only way to be able to visit the Mountain Lab is to be invited. The other way is very rare: to win a contest in which the prize is to be able to visit the Mountain Lab, of which there has only been one.
[edit] The Video: MTN. Lab
MTN. Lab was filmed on location primarily in Park City, Utah, at the DC Mountain Lab, during the winter of 2005. Other locations that were filmed at are Park City ski resort, Twin Bridges, California, at Northstar-at-Tahoe ski resort, Colorado at Breckenridge ski resort, and Mammoth Lakes, California, at Mammoth Mountain ski resort. It features the riding of Travis Parker, Simon Chamberlain, Eddie Wall, Travis Rice, Renee Renee, Priscilla Levac, Bjorn Leines, Todd Richards, Devun Walsh, Drew Fuller, Chad Otterstrom, and Jake Welch. DC sponsors all riders except for Renee Renee and Chad Otterstrom, but Jake Welch and Drew Fuller are DC amateurs. The video features songs performed by Frou Frou, The Faint, The Soundtrack of Our Lives, Shawn Lee’s Ping Pong Orchestra, The Wannadies, American Analog Set, Big Country, Del Tha Funky Homosapien, Chemical Brothers, Renee Renee, Metric, and Technotronic.
[edit] Highlights
[edit] Travis Parker
Highlights from Travis’ section include backflips, method grabs, and numerous tricks in which he uses a hula hoop. He ollies over the hula hoop, and also spins it all the way around himself while he is in the air. Other highlights are a nosegrab to tailgrab in the same air.
[edit] Todd Richards
Highlights from Todd’s section include multiple 540s on the road gaps, a 360 stall to 360 out on the wallride, and a method grab.
[edit] Bjorn Leines
Highlights in Bjorn’s section include a 360 on a stepdown in the backcountry, a method grab, and a frontslide on the large C-rail.
[edit] Devun Walsh
Highlights from Devun’s section include a very-slow-motion 180 nosegrab and a 360.
[edit] Travis Rice
Highlights from Travis’ section include a 50-50 to frontflip on the box going through the house, a 180 stall to 180 out on the wallride, and a whole line on the double road gap, hip transfer, and the wall ride. He did a 540 on the first road gap, a method grab on the second road gap, a stiffy grab on the hip transfer, and a 180 stall to 180 out on the wallride.
[edit] Road Trips
Highlights include Travis Parker doing a tail-tap to 360 out, Todd Richards doing a rodeo 720 off a backcountry kicker, Drew Fuller doing a 50-50 nollie out performed on a rainbow rail in which the nollie at the very top cleared the rest of the rail, and Todd Richards and Travis Parker riding tandem in the halfpipe in colorful full-body snowsuits. Other highlights include Travis Parker landing a jump in manual.
[edit] Simon Chamberlain
Simon Chamberlain has an outstanding section in Mountain Lab, in terms of technical ability and visible ease in the performing of the said tricks. The opening shots of his section are possibly the highlights of his section. He does a nosepress to tail-tap out, a 360 nosepress, a 180 to nosepress to 180 out, a boardslide to 270 out, and a noseslide in which he 180’s and lands in a tailslide back on the box. He does all these tricks on a single flat box. A large part of his section is made up of these same tricks on different features. Another exciting line of his is when he does a butter to shifty to shoulder roll, then 360’s over a boundary line.
[edit] Eddie Wall
Highlights in Eddie’s section include a tailslide on a box covered in powder, scraping all the powder off, a frontslide to 270 out, a 360 spin on a wavy box. The section also includes interesting camera effects, such as grainy-looking footage and very zoomed-in shots. Another key feature is the lineup that Eddie does, in which he does a nosepress on a table, a 180 to tail-press to 180 out. He is then handed a rifle, and shoots at a skeet shot, then hands the rifle off to a ready bystander. Then he does a 270 to boardslide, goes over a roller, does a boardslide-to-fakie, then does a boardslide back to regular, then a frontslide, then a 180, then a 360 box spin to 180 out. This is especially impressive since it is all in quick succession, in the untraditional style of a whole run being filmed and put into the video without any editing.
[edit] Sources
All information regarding the Mountain Lab was taken from the video MTN. Lab, and from http://www.skiparckcity.net.
