PARK CITY — Tucker Norred, marketing manager for the new Woodward Park City, had no idea why the area used to be called Gorgoza.
Of course he didn’t. He’s a 29-year-old skateboarder/snowboarder from Southern California who is still pinching himself that he gets to live in the Utah mountains and, as he put it, “get paid to do what I love.”
Extolling the present, not the past, is his job.
In the action sports world, the 125-acre Woodward Park City campus is easy to extoll. Name it, they have the terrain for it: snowboards, skateboards, skis, mountain bikes, BMX bikes, scooters, tubes. There’s even a place to practice parkour, an extreme action sport — and special favorite of personal injury lawyers — that involves landing on your feet while jumping over obstacles from far-flung object to far-flung object.
After nearly two years, Woodward Park City, billing itself as “Utah’s ultimate year-round action sports and ski resort,” is up and running. It had its grand opening a little over two months ago.
It isn’t a traditional ski resort. The focal point is a 66,000-square-foot indoor sports hub with ramps, rails, foam landing pits and trampolines. There’s just one outdoor hill, and a chairlift ride to the top takes about as long as a single TRAX stop.
But the compactness is its appeal. Action sports aren’t about long lift rides and longer cruiser runs, they’re about tricks and flips and doing it again.
How’s the reception been so far?
“We’re very pleased. We’re right about where we planned,” said Tucker. “The more people hear about what we’re doing and what we have to offer, the more they’re coming to see for themselves.”
The first Woodward facility was a gymnastics training camp that was started 50 years ago in the little village of Woodward in the mountains of Pennsylvania, 30 miles from State College and the campus of Penn State University.
Gradually, over the next several years as skateboards, snowboards and mountain bikes invaded the world’s consciousness, more action sports were added to the curriculum and more Woodward camps began to spring up.
Now there are 12 Woodwards in North America and Mexico, the one in Park City being the latest and greatest.
Woodward Park City takes the place of Gorgoza Park, the tubing park that preceded it.
The tubing lanes on the west side of the acreage have been incorporated into the new camp; they have been extended and a magic carpet added to make getting to the top of the runs easier.
But the name “Gorgoza,” it appears, is destined to disappear.
At least Rodriguez Velasquez de la Gorgozada isn’t alive to see it.
Back in the 1880s, according to histories of the Park City area, Gorgozada figured in a transcontinental land scheme that promised more than it ever delivered.
Silver had recently been discovered in the Park City mountains, giving rise to a heyday that would produce over half-a-billion in revenue back when half-a-billion meant something.
The only railroad to haul the silver and ore from Park City was one that connected to Ogden. This did not sit well with businessmen in Salt Lake City, who wanted the capital city to be the hub. An entrepreneur named John Young, a son of Brigham Young, set out to remedy this problem by building a railroad through Parleys Canyon, roughly paralleling today’s I-80 freeway.
But it was steep and rough going, as anyone today with a four-cylinder car can attest, and Young was soon running out of money. He needed investors. He went to New York to talk to bankers, who turned him away but told him about a wealthy nobleman in Spain, the above-named Rodriguez Velasquez de la Gorgozada, who was fascinated by stories of the U.S. West and might be a good person to talk to.
Young made his way to Europe, where he and Gorgozada sat down to talk face to face.
The clincher in the deal they made was that Young, in exchange for a $1 million investment ($28 million in today’s dollars), agreed to name the city he had planned for the railroad terminus outside Park City Gorgoza – for Senor Gorgozada.
The railroad was built and the Gorgoza name was duly recorded on deeds of the area. Reportedly, Gorgozada made a trip to Utah and rode the railroad himself to see where his namesake town would be located.
But after a short time, the silver, and the railroad, died and the town was never built.
A little ski hill called Gorgoza Resort in the 1960s and the Gorgoza Park tubing hill that operated from 2000-18 paid homage of sorts to John Young’s deal.
But now Woodward is in and Gorgoza is gone.
Apprised of this history, Tucker Norred, Woodward Park City’s new marketing manager, listened attentively and then commented, “I did not know that.”
Yeah, it was a long time ago.