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WELLSVILLE — A couple of Cache County farmers turned a little family fun into a side business when they decided to build a water park.
The homemade slip and slides are as long and steep as they could build, and they're far more impressive than the typical backyard water toy. Total, they were built with 700 feet of plastic in an open area, tucked behind the cornfields at Little Bear Bottoms.
"It's redneck. I mean, we're not trying to keep you clean or anything," said Jed Clark, one of the farmers behind the slide.
The slides are a bit muddy, but people don't seem to mind.
"That was unreal," said Steve Hobbs after taking his first time down the slide, adding that he was going to do it again.
Clark said the two sets of water slides get used almost everyday during the summer.
"This was all a sod farm here and we just started putting membrane out," he said. "We started going further and further, and here you see we came all the way out into the corn."
That's over 300 feet each of roofing plastic, heat-welded together at the seams. Clark said it's the slides that keep them in business, especially after the sod farm business fell apart with the housing market several years ago.
"It got to the point where we didn't have the time to take it down to cut sod," Clark said. "We just had to keep using it all summer long."
It's redneck. I mean, we're not trying to keep you clean or anything.
–Jed Clark
Just a trickle of water goes down the slide because Clark said too much slows the rider down. Many of the slide's fans have developed methods to go faster, including riding down as a mult-person train.
"The more people in your train, the faster you go," said rider Misty Padialla.
Clark said he rented one of the slides out to a group of police officers, who then used radar to clock their speeds. The average speed was about 33 mph down the slide.
