Charlotte, N.C. – Unless your name is Scott Shipley, it’s difficult to imagine the sprawling semi-artificial habitat that is the U.S. National Whitewater Center (USNWC).
Nestled between two interstates 10 minutes from downtown Charlotte, N.C., and the future site of the NASCAR Hall of Fame, the USNWC is a model in paradox, 300 acres of woodlands along the Catawba River waterfront with its crown jewel presented in the form of a four-channel cement canal. To Shipley, a three-time Olympic whitewater kayaker and the designer of the artificial river, it is a model for the future.
“When I retired after 27 years of kayak racing in 2000, I just had a real firm idea in my head of what I thought would be an ideal whitewater park,” said Shipley, an employee of Recreation Engineering and Planning, a Boulder-based whitewater park design company. “I’m hoping to do several more of these.”
The whitewater park in Shipley’s mind officially came to fruition Saturday, celebrating its grand opening with nearly 6,000 people gathering along the man-made riverbank for the ribbon cutting to formally usher in a new era in adventure sports. As the $37 million price tag might imply, the USNWC is hardly a typical whitewater park.
Shipley was joined in his vision by his boss – veteran park designer Gary Lacy – and Charlotte business magnates Vic Howie and Chet Rabon to create the world’s largest self-circulating whitewater river. Inspired by the Penrith Whitewater Stadium at the 2000 Sydney Olympics and a similar stadium built for the Athens Games in 2004, the USNWC takes the concept to the next level.
The USNWC’s 3,750 feet of river channel are separated into four sections designed to cater to all paddlers, from recreational rafters to Olympic slalom racers. To date, the newly designated official Olympic training site and home of USA Canoe and Kayak (USACK) is the only multi-channel re-circulating river in the world, capable of accommodating up to 50 rafts (about 250 paddlers) at once.
The circular layout dropping 21 vertical feet begins and ends with two ponds connected by seven 680-horsepower pumps capable of pushing 1,250 cubic feet per second through the 50- to 60-foot wide, 6-feet-deep concrete channels. It’s enough water to fill a 50-meter Olympic-size swimming pool in about eight seconds.
Water is drawn from a city tap and treated by a $1 million ultraviolet-light filtering system capable of cleaning all 12 million gallons every 24 hours.
Other man-made bragging points include the world’s steepest slalom channel, the world’s highest volume “big water” paddling channel and specific areas designed for instruction, safety and rescue training, even a 7-foot-tall big surf wave designed to replicate a Colorado kayaking favorite known as the “M Wave” in Montrose. All of these features can be manipulated by a variety of features, including head gates that alternately open and close the channels. Overhead lighting allows boaters to paddle into the night.
“The good thing about the scale of this project is that we really didn’t have to compromise on anything,” Shipley said. “The first thing we did was make a list of everybody who was going to use it – from beginning kayakers to rafters to people strolling around the course – then we created something for each of those people.”
Bringing outdoors to all
The hands-down coolest feature, however, is the 120-foot conveyer belt that carries paddlers from the lower pond back to the upper in less than two minutes, without leaving their boats.
“We call this our Southeast ski slope,” USNWC director of marketing and development Lance Kinerk said, “and that’s the lift.”
The whitewater center’s design doesn’t end at the water. The bigger picture introduces Southeast city slickers to a world of outdoor adventure sports with the nation’s largest twin artificial rock climbing towers (40 routes up towers standing 47 feet and 37 feet), 11 miles of mountain biking, trail running and hiking trails (soon to be expanded) and a multifaceted high-rope “challenge course.” All of this is alongside a café, bar, small retail outlet, open air amphitheater and 2,400-square-foot conference center.
“The original idea was a one-channel river system in downtown Charlotte, and we slowly evolved into pushing an entire outdoor lifestyle in Charlotte,” Kinerk said. “So as opposed to just having a single channel downtown, now we’ve got this big river as well as the challenge course, the climbing, the mountain biking. What would have been a ride is now a lifestyle.”
The concept already has taken off, with unbuilt neighborhoods in the surrounding area evolving from “starter homes” to $400,000 homes in planned communities with names like Whitewater Glen, banking on the park spawning economic growth like a small ski resort. Likewise, Joel Heath of Vail-based Untraditional Marketing recently submitted a proposal for an Eastern version of the popular Teva Mountain Games next September after visiting the Charlotte venue.
“The major block to the growth of adventure sports has been accessibility. By bringing the mountains to the people, it creates a bigger platform for us and enables us to expose a new demographic to adventure sports,” Heath said.
Expectations high
As the new home venue for USACK, the whitewater center is wedded to the challenge of nourishing the rapidly fading Olympic discipline of slalom kayak racing. But while the opportunity to paddle alongside an Olympic athlete serves as a stellar marketing tool, USNWC operators understand that even a boatload of gold medals isn’t going to pay the bills, estimated at $1.2 million annually for electricity alone.
Fortunately, the business model can point to a growing demand for outdoor recreation facilities, supported by the Outdoor Industry Association’s 2006 Participation Study showing overall participation in human-powered outdoor activities such as biking, hiking, kayaking and rafting rising among adults by 5 percent from 1998 to 2005.
Much like the trend toward natural whitewater parks Lacy’s company helped spur in Golden, Steamboat, Salida, Pueblo and Reno, Nev., in the past decade, expectations are high for a similar movement toward artificial river parks, especially given the prevailing legal and environmental challenges surrounding Western water use.
As evidence, the comparably crafted Adventure Sports Center International near Wisp Ski Resort in western Maryland is currently in its final stage of construction and preparing to test its whitewater course by making use of the ski area’s mountaintop snowmaking pond this month for a grand opening April 1.
But the biggest commitment to the concept comes out of Phoenix, where there are plans to build what it calls the world’s first “outdoor super park adventure and resort destination.” The 200-plus-acre site is designed by Waveyard Development LLC to capitalize on an increasing number of adventure sports enthusiasts through a $250 million residential, resort, retail and entertainment experience built around surfing, rafting, kayaking, climbing, scuba diving, skateboarding, mountain biking and fly-fishing in the desert Southwest.
Shipley has been invited to build upon the USNWC model and break ground in 2007 on the world’s new largest, multi-channel, recirculating whitewater river alongside a wave pool for surfing, a series of fly-fishing ponds, a climbing center, mountain-bike course and a diving lagoon lined with fiber-optic lights for night dives.
“It’s essentially a retail resort built around an outdoor adventure lifestyle,” Shipley said of the Waveyard proposal calling for a 320-room hotel, 150 villas, a 30,000-square-foot conference center, 150,000 square feet of retail, 30,000 square feet of office space, numerous restaurants, an amphitheater and multiple residential communities. “The whitewater park will be similar, but there are other elements.”
Indeed, Waveyard is the best indicator to date that private developers might someday move away from the trend toward golf course communities and catch on to Shipley’s scheme to replicate the USNWC as an economic anchor in as many places as possible.
“In a sense it’s easier to build a park like this than to go into a river and do it,” said Shipley, adding that there are no plans in the works for an artificial park in Colorado. “I could build one of these parks anywhere.”
Staff writer Scott Willoughby can be reached at 303-954-1993 or swilloughby@denverpost.com.
