He Dreams of an Indoor Winter Wonderland

Mike Gerard lives in San Clemente, where you can spit into the Pacific, so his dream seems a little incongruous.

“Wouldn’t it be neat to have an Olympic snowboarding champion come out of a city somewhere, a kid who had never been on a mountain, to become one of the world’s best snowboarders? That would be a dream come true,” Gerard says.

Huh?

If that is your first reaction, Gerard will set you straight.

Gerard is the chief of operations and marketing for the Glacier of Anaheim LLC, a company that is planning to build a major indoor sports complex in the parking lot at Edison Field. The complex will include an indoor wave park for surfers, a 75-foot rock-climbing wall, an indoor skydiving facility.

So the building will be monstrous, 435,000 square feet, 150 feet tall and cost about $65 million. It will be called Sportstown and is being developed by Glacier Sports Enterprises and the city of Anaheim.

That is the boring, financial data, and Gerard can talk about all that. But those numbers aren’t what fuels his imagination.

What Gerard sees when he closes his eyes are loads of kids catching big air on a halfpipe in July or January. He wants to bring the mountains to the people, to make snowboarding as accessible to Southern California teenagers as skateboarding is.

“It costs money to get to the mountains,” Gerard says. “People are afraid to drive on mountain roads in the winter. People don’t know how to put chains on their cars or they don’t want to be bothered. Kids see the sport on TV but to translate that into getting up on a mountain, it’s not easy.

“Snowboarding is a sport with huge growth potential. We just need to get it to the people. I want to see kids of all ages and all ethnic groups have a chance to do this.”

As Gerard talks about his dream, you pretty much want to put on a heavy coat and gloves and run out to scrape the snow off your car. He makes winter seem real.

“There’s going to be a large sloping surface of snow. It’s going to be machine-made snow, like the ski resorts, only better. Indoors, you can control the conditions. The air temperatures and the humidity. The colder and drier the better. What we can do inside is control those variables. It’s going to be great.”

Gerard says he has been a ski racer since he was 7. And that wasn’t easy since Gerard was growing up in Carlisle, Pa., in the southeast part of the state where ski mountains are not easy to come by. “I don’t imagine anybody’s heard of Ski Roundtop have they?” Gerard says.

How he got his love of snow, Gerard’s not sure. All he knew was that he had to make his way west. To mountains. To snow. To Mammoth as a ski instructor. To Vail, Colo., and New Zealand and to Bear Mountain, where he was part of getting the first snowboarding park built at the San Bernardino County mountain.

It is snowboarding that gets Gerard’s eyes blazing, his hands sweaty, the words tumbling out of his mouth.

“The ski industry was softening up and snowboarding has come along to keep it alive,” Gerard said. “Snowboarding is on the rise, and I want to keep it that way. At the four major Southern California [ski] resorts, they get about a million ski visits a season.

“But if you put these places in the center of large, metropolitan areas, just watch what happens.”

Spend an afternoon at New Mountain High or Snow Summit, two Southern California resorts. Ask some of the kids there if they’d snowboard indoors. The excitement might knock you down.

“Man, that’d be awesome,” Jim O’Hearn, a 17-year-old boarder from Newport Beach said. “We try to come up to Mountain High as much as we can after school, but you can’t always get in the car and make it up. Not as much as we want.”

What Gerard sees are the 12-year-olds who drive you crazy skateboarding down the street being lured indoors and onto the snow for a change of pace. He sees those 12-year-olds turning into 17-year-olds who have gotten hooked, who come every day after school, and who turn into 20-something competitive boarders who will compete in sanctioned tournaments right there in the parking lot of Edison Field.

“You see, I think indoor tournaments would be even better than outdoors. You saw it at the Olympics. The weather is such a variable. . . .

“Host an event indoors. We’ll have it all wired for video and sound. A television studio built right here. We’ll make perfect snow and a perfect event.”

Groundbreaking should happen in April, Gerard says. From there, about 14 months of construction and then the dream happens. Gerard sees boys and girls, kids of every color, falling in love with the snow and the board. Indoors.

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Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com