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Scott Shipley is standing on an island in the North Carolina woods surrounded by whitewater. It’s a familiar perspective for the former Olympic kayaker, who trained for years on the tumbling rivers west of here, but today he’s not scouting rapids. He’s talking into his cellphone, orchestrating the movements of forklifts from the vantage point of a concrete dam at the center of the island. An island, not incidentally, that he designed himself.
That plot of land is the beating heart of the U.S. National Whitewater Center outside Charlotte, which became the world’s largest artificial whitewater park when it opened on August 27. The $36-million-dollar park is set up much like a ski resort. Rafters and kayakers navigate any of three concrete channels that stretch from an upper pool to a lower pool, 21 feet below. A conveyor belt then runs the paddlers up the center of the island, providing an endless loop of fast and bouncy Class II to IV rapids.
When Shipley, 35, a 2002 graduate of Georgia Tech’s graduate engineering program, teamed up with Gary Lacy, a former city engineer for Boulder, Colorado, to create the park, they had two requirements: provide a venue for elite competition, and attract recreational users as well. These dual goals inspired ingeniously simple innovations, like the park’s unique multichannel design, which can accommodate expert slalom racers and beginners at the same time. Another breakthrough: energy-saving pneumatic gates at the head of each channel that allow the streams to be opened or closed independently and water to be pumped for only the stream that’s being used.
Of course, it’s the quality of the rapids that will determine if people come. And so Shipley sought out the best whitewater features in the world and carefully modeled and improved on his favorites. The bouncy M-Wave is fashioned after a surfing wave in Montrose, Colorado. The park’s biggest whitewater feature, the roaring seven-foot drop at the bottom of the expert channel, is based loosely on a famous river rapid in Bratislava, Slovakia.
Shipley’s goal is to spread his parks across the U.S. (he’s already planning installations for Phoenix and Dallas). “The future,” he says, “is to tie these parks in with land-development projects, to put one of these parks right where people live, so they can paddle on their way to work in the morning.”
—Tom Colligan
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