FARMINGTON — Thousands of people a day zip past Lagoon at 65 mph on I-15, with the most obvious sight being the amusement park's large empty parking lot. Most onlookers probably believe that Lagoon sleeps in winter. But with 200 off-season employees, Lagoon is a busy place — even in late February.
"People think we close down in winter," said Dick Andrew, Lagoon's director of marketing. "Nothing could be further from the truth."
Off-season at Lagoon, now just 5 1/2 months — from November to mid-April — is when the park does the majority of its new construction and refurbishes rides, paints, resurfaces, seals and reroofs.
"It's very involved," Andrew said.
Scheduling regular maintenance for each of the park's dozens of rides alone is a complicated process.
In summer, Lagoon employs a total of 2,500 people and may have as many as 30,000 patrons in the park at one time.
The four-season climate in Utah doesn't help Lagoon's maintenance work, and unlike Southern California or Florida, where amusement parks can rotate taking rides off line for maintenance in all but the busiest three summer months, Lagoon has a much tighter schedule to work with, and the weather doesn't always cooperate for outdoor projects.
"We're not just talking keeping rides aesthetically appealing with new paint jobs but also checking for important safety factors — metal fatigue, adding new bolts and replacement parts," said Andrew.
You have to continually update the infrastructure because the park has existed 105 years at its current location and is 121 years old when you count its lake shore predecessor, he said. (Lagoon is considered the nation's second oldest amusement park, with roots going back to the Bamberger railroad era of the 1880s.)
While little work may be visible from I-15 or even the frontage road, workers are scattered throughout the 121-plus acre park on various construction and refurbishing projects. Much of the work is done inside the park's large metal maintenance building. Occasionally, parts of movies or TV commercials are filmed in portions of the park during the off-season.
On a recent tour of the park, sidewalks and asphalt walkways were being used as roads for trucks and work crews. Snow is removed from the park only where needed.
Despite the several hundred workers, the large size of Lagoon makes solitude and quiet a possibility.
Some rides, such as the Tidal Wave, are covered with a large plastic sheet. Many kiddie rides, such as the Centennial Screamer, have been disassembled and their main parts put in storage so they're out of the cold, wet weather. Sliding doors on the park's games are shut.
A tour of the large maintenance building reveals where a lot of invisible-to-the-public labor is going on.
Scott Wilson, paint manager for Lagoon, said each ride comes into the shop at least every six to eight years for extensive testing, refurbishing and repainting. Ride maintenance is carefully prioritized.
On this particular day, the Jet Star II lighted sign is being stripped, rewired and painted. Several Flying Aces cabs are being sanded and repainted in their traditional bright colors. The Space Scrambler ride cars are being refurbished and repainted. Paint crews wear safety head gear to avoid breathing paint fumes.
Underneath a thick sheet of plastic are three of the Merry-Go-Round's handcarved animals. They are part of Lagoon's oldest ride — 100-plus years — and worth anywhere from $20,000 to $80,000 a piece, demanding extra care and attention from Lagoon's artist, Lori Capener.
In another part of the building there's an extensive parts supply shop and tool crib. It resembles a large car dealer's parts shop, and the intent is to have the parts workers need on site. There is also a welding shop and a carpenter's room.
"We make our own wrought iron fencing," Andrew said.
The warehouse section of the building includes 40-foot-high shelves to store Lagoon's papergoods and food. Since Lagoon goes through so much food in the summer, this area becomes a beehive of activity in winter.
Upstairs are offices, restrooms and a lunchroom. There's also Lagoon's on-site sign shop. From ride signs to food signs, Lagoon can create it all here.
If there's a Santa's workshop-type area at Lagoon, it is the main floor maintenance shop. Dozens of workers scurry about, doing extensive repair work on the metal cars that travel Lagoon's wooden roller coaster. Metal stress tests, replacing old bolts with new ones and making adjustments are part of the process. The Jet Star II cars are also in the shop undergoing the same repairs.
A few Top Eliminator dragsters and even some of Lagoon's new Double Thunder raceway cars are in the shop. The park also does in-house repairs on its fleet of electric cars and other vehicles used by workers to traverse Lagoon quickly.
Lagoon gets even busier in late spring, when opening day is on the horizon. Some years, that means a dawn to dusk, seven-days-a-week rush to finish preparations for the new season.
This year Lagoon will open on weekends beginning Saturday, April 14.
Here are other highlights of what was going on at Lagoon on a typical winter day:
A work crew digs up a large waterline near the park's wooden roller coaster.
Half-a-dozen workers are remodeling the former Gaslight Theater into a second Arby's Restaurant.
Several employees enclose the former Cottonwood Terrace to create an expanded on-site food catering service for Lagoon picnics.
A lone worker makes ready three freshly poured concrete slabs for new picnic terraces on the northeast side of Pioneer Village.
The old Speedway ride has been removed and an employee is doing some underground pipe work in preparation for the new Cliffhanger ride that will be built on the same spot, just south of the wooden roller coaster.
With warmer weather and limited snow cover, some employees are catching up on leaf raking that did not get done last fall.
The serpentine slides, on the south end of Lagoon-a-Beach, have been repainted and sealed. Also, a new wooden boardwalk was installed this off-season in Pioneer Village, and bright new paint is visible throughout the park — most of it done last fall.
The eight employees of the marketing office are busy with group sales and scheduling company days and picnics for the upcoming summer season. Since 4,000 different groups/companies visit Lagoon each year, that's no simple task.
"We execute what is planned in winter each summer," Andrew said.
Security workers patrol the park overnight, year-round, to prevent vandalism and trespassing.
E-mail: lynn@desnews.com