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AHWATUKEE FOOTHILLS NEWS www.ahwatukee.com
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Wednesday, November 29, 2017
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After a hike, you soon can bounce around here
AHWATUKEE FOOTHILLS NEWS Urban Air Adventure Park will offer bounce house on steroids
Pima Canyon Trail Head improvement project is nearing completion
BY PAUL MARYNIAK AFN Executive Editor
BY JIM WALSH AFN Staff Writer
ome early January, Ahwatukee will become home to the only place in the Valley where kids – and adults, for that matter – can literally bounce off the walls. Occupying 24,000 square feet of the old Sports Authority building on the northeast corner of 48th Street and Ray Road, Urban Air Adventure Park promises a full-service family entertainment center where people of all ages can dodge, dip, duck and dive off Olympic-size trampolines and bouncehouse-like walls and even swing in harnesses from the ceiling. “The reason parents like to bring their kids is because of the physical activity they get,” said Dale Fedewa, who owns an Urban Air franchise in San Antonio already and is opening the Ahwatukee operation – the first of several he is planning for the Valley. Making its Arizona debut, Urban Air will occupy part of a massive building that will be shared by Mountainside Fitness, the gym franchise that started in Ahwatukee but eventually left in the early 2000s as its locations spread across the Valley. What Urban Air won’t be is a trampoline place. It’s more like a bounce house on steroids with some safer versions of parts of a boot camp obstacle course. “The trampoline places are 0.5 version. In San Antonio, we have the 1.0 version, and Ahwatukee will be the 1.5 version,” Fedewa said. “We’ll have climbing walls, Olympic-style trampolines you can do tricks on.
outh Mountain Park manager Dan Gronseth remembers when a dirt road with a few turnouts at the end was the extent of Pima Canyon Trail Head in the 1980s. Visitors would get out of their cars and trucks to check out the Marcos de Niza Rock – whose inscription refers to a possible visit by the Spanish explorer and priest in 1539 but later was called by an Arizona State University professor an example of fraudulent history. Those quiet, peaceful days came to an end quickly because of growth in nearby parts of Ahwatukee and the increasing popularity of hiking, trail running, mountain biking and climbing. Gradually, the easy access to Ahwatukee and several popular trails turned Pima Canyon into South Mountain Park’s busiest trailhead, overwhelming the aging facilities and making parking a challenge during the popular winter hiking season. Now, Pima Canyon is on the brink of a new era, with construction crews working six days a week on a series of improvements that replace stinky pit toilets with flush toilets, a reconfigured parking lot designed to improve functionality and new ramadas that will give the trailhead a focal point. The improvements have come at a cost beyond the $2 million in sales tax revenues approved by voters for Phoenix Mountain preserve improvement projects. Residents such as David Drennon, who
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LIGHTS on page 16
(Urban Air Adventure Park/Special to AFN)
ABOVE: Urban Air Adventure Park in San Antonio, above, has many of the same features of its Ahwatukee counterpart. BELOW: the foundation is in for a ramada at Pima Canyon Trail Head.
See
MOUNTAIN on page 10