October 20, 2009

A couple of weekends ago the new and improved one million dollar Green River play park opened in Wyoming after being out of commission for four years. It was originally built in 2002 and was a great feature, hole at low flows, wave during runoff. The town held two competitions a summer with cash prizes,dinners, they went all out, this all came to an end in 2005 when the feature was undermined and fell into the river. Construction started this past spring on the new park by the same engineer and construction company(Colorado river works) that built the Vail feature. The new feature is built traditional with lots of boulders and cement until you get to the center of river and feature. Here is a twenty by thirty cement slab with eight adjustable steel plates on air blatters inlaid flush to the slab four on top, four on bottom adjusted from a control box on side of river. The water level was about 1200 cfs, a common late summer, fall flow and with all gates down the feature was a green wave and with the right ones up a very shallow sticky hole. In the late afternoon after about five hours of trying different settings we had a really good hole, big air, user friendly, tricks easy and the twenty five boaters that showed up said leave it, its aw some! It's really cool to see how these new adjustable feature really work, the models show that it should be a sick wave during runoff when average flows are four to six thousand cfs. Two thumbs up for the new park, that come with pavilion and sandy beach, a must stop when traveling on I-80 through Wyoming! Billy Malesky TJK