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North Elba: Toboggan chute should be ready once ice is ready

The toboggan chute on Mirror Lake in Lake Placid is seen last week. (Enterprise photo — Antonio Olivero)

LAKE PLACID — The town of North Elba is putting the finishing touches on its new toboggan chute as winter nears, hopeful people will be able to use the attraction earlier than last year when the new chute opened mid-February.

Town Councilman Derek Doty said the town’s park district is in the process of finishing the chute. The chute cabin’s enclosed windows have been ordered and are scheduled to be installed by mid-November.

Doty added that the town has come up with a solution for the start at the top of the slide on the southwest shore of Mirror Lake: to install four self-start aluminum bars for riders to pull off of to begin down the track, similar to how lugers start their runs, Doty said.

“You can start yourself, it’s on the flat,” Doty said. No machines. Nothing to break down.

“I mean,” he continued, “we’ve been scratching our heads on, ‘Electric? Hydraulic? How big is the ramp going to be?’ Why?”

Doty also said the town will complete the base of the slide by installing leftover veneer stone that the town possesses, stone originally intended for a viewing platform at the North Elba Show Grounds. Town Councilman Jack Favro, Director of the Lake Placid Olympic Training Center, also said the town may use leftover stone from the OTC to donate for the slide.

The opening of the slide this year will be the first full season of the new toboggan chute since the town decided two years ago to tear down the old slide after decades of use rusted away at its structure. The new chute opened Feb. 11 of last year.

In the past, the North Elba Park District has deemed the chute fit to open by the weekend of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the third Monday in January, though that hinges on ice thickness. In 2015-16, a lack of ice thickness resulted in the chute never opening before the town deemed it structurally unsafe and began looking into building a new one. In 2016-17, messy and slushy ice conditions limited the chute’s operation to just a handful of days.

Last August, the town council unanimously passed a bond resolution to finance the new slide, awarding the construction contract to Jeffords Steel at a cost of $273,996 to the town. The old slide, which was demolished and scrapped, had been converted into the toboggan chute from a Lake Placid Club ski jump in 1965.

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