IDAHO FALLS — The pool looks to be at least 15 feet deep, but there’s no water in it. Instead, there’s wood, metal, beer and soda cans, rocks, weeds and enough tires to stock an auto shop. Crawling up the sides and middle are the relics of vandals: hundreds of graffiti marks, from hearts to vulgarity to the single word, “Why?”
This abandoned hole in the ground, located in the hills above Iona, holds many whys, chief among them being, “Why did the water park shut down?”
The pool and the land around were part of the Thunder Ridge Water Park in the 1980s. Many old-timers around Idaho Falls can remember taking their kids, or going as kids themselves, to splash in the pool, slip down the long slide, play miniature golf and picnic.
Some of the more covert stories involve teens sneaking in at night to skinny dip or swim when no one was around.
Bonneville County Commissioner Roger Christensen remembers the water park being open all year. The pool, which was once indoor, was closed in winter, but the park also ran a ski slope, with a rope tow attached to a truck to pull the skiers back up the hill. Once, a boy got caught in the rope tow and died, Christensen said.
While many buildings and places in Idaho have lasted for 100 years or more, Thunder Ridge rose and fell in a much shorter time. Records show the water park was once called Panorama Hills Swimming Pool in the ’60s and ’70s, but details are scarce about who owned it then or why it was sold.
The land went through several owners during its early years, according to documents obtained from the Bonneville County Assessor’s Office. Three men — Blaine Watts, Richard Connerly and Roger Ball — owned a company called Tons U Fun, Inc., which ran the water park. Watts was the president of the company from 1980 to 1982 and passed the torch to Ball.
After only eight years as a business, Tons U Fun was dissolved in 1988, after Ball brought the land into his own company, King B. Jerky Inc. Ball then sold it, pool and all, to Houghland Farms in a real estate trade in 1986. What year the water park actually closed down isn’t certain, but it would have been before the sale to Houghland Farm.
Lying unattended, the water park deteriorated. Concrete remained, but the long slide no longer exists. Some Idaho Falls residents remember sneaking into the park after dark and skateboarding down the slide into the empty pool, using flashlights to know when they had to slow down.
Now there is only a rounded U-shape in the side of the pool where the slide would flow in, and a lonely metal tower high on the hill where the slide started. Even green carpet remains on the narrow lanes of the miniature golf course, but the slide was removed because intruders kept using it.
Why did Thunder Ridge close down? EastIdahoNews.com hasn’t been able to establish a firm reason, but there is speculation. Christensen thinks perhaps the accident where the boy died had something to do with it. Local business owner Rick Dennings said perhaps there were deaths in the owners’ families. A representative of Houghland Farms, who declined to give his name, said it was just too hard to maintain; up in the hills, there is no naturally hot water, so all the water had to be expensively heated with propane.
The land around the old water park is developed or developing, with farms and houses, but the Thunder Ridge lot is covered in spiny bushes, dirt roads that are little more than footpaths, and colorful spray paint. Houghland Farms has no plans to develop the land. It’s simply not worth the money.
The wind still blows strong up on those hills, but no bathers play in the empty, dusty pools, or tee off on the ripped green carpet that still exists despite sun, rain, wind and snow. Now there are only the vandals, leaving behind their alien heads, names and a conspiracy declaration that “Bush did 9/11.”
On the next property over, tractors roll across the yellow fields, throwing up dust. Windmills churn lazily through the air. But they are too far away to hear. The only sounds are the wind rushing through the thorny plants and birds taking sudden flight from bushes and barren trees. Instead of the smell of chlorine, Thunder Ridge has the faint, musty smell of dying grass and coming autumn.
Thunder Ridge now lies under the shadow of cell phone towers. It gets great reception up there, so visitors can tell all their friends about the graffitied swimming pool and the fraying green carpet, while the wind whispers stories that have never been told.
