A year ago at Massanutten Resort, a ski and golf center, they opened a water park to keep the guests coming during those warm, snowless months. Who knew that would include December and January?

“We’ve had families … who have gone to the water park, played golf and skied all in one day,” Joe Grandstaff, Massanutten’s director of marketing.

From a small ski and golf resort in the 1970s, Massanutten has become a 7,000-acre town in a tuck of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The 42,000-square-foot water park is a $30 million collection of fanciful slides, artificial rivers and mighty waves

The place boasts two 18-hole golf courses, 14 ski runs, a 12-lane tubing park, two recreation centers (each with indoor pool), a six-building hotel, a half-dozen eating places and 1,700 time-share condos (it’s the largest time-share site in Virginia).

The steep, mountainous terrain around the ski area is Massanutten at its best, with long Shenandoah Valley views and dense woods enclosing the many condo complexes. The golf course up here, Mountain Greens, is a tight and challenging affair, with steeply terraced tees and fairways that spill like green glaciers out of narrow slopes.

The second, newer course, Woodstone Meadows, is down on the valley floor, a more austere course absolutely swarmed by tightly packed condominium buildings. It’s a bit of a time-share Levittown, but a popular one; Massanutten is building yet more complexes to meet the demand.

The resort has a manic devotion to Things to Do. There’s an elaborate go-cart track, tennis courts and hiking trails (for people and for horses), miniature golf and a catalog of classes and tours that runs to more than 125 events a week. (Stained-glass lessons, anyone? Wine seminar? Couples’ massage?)

But the undisputed headliner of this show is the great water park a mile or so down the main road (there are no shuttles at Massanutten, so expect to be in your car a good deal). Three stories of arcades, eateries and gift shops overlook the main hall, where splashes and shouts fill the vast, hangar-like space.

The centerpiece is a kind of mountainous waterworks calliope that climbs to the rafters as the kids climb on it, sliding down the chutes, aiming industrial water guns and dumping buckets on one another. Every few minutes, a tank the size of a cement truck tips over, dousing the ecstatic crowd with thousands of gallons of water.

A fast-paced wave machine creates a perfect eternal breaker for one surfer or boogie-boarder at a time. There’s a commodious indoor-outdoor hot tub, an enchanting frog pond for the littlest pre-swimmers and a selection of towering extreme waterslides, some pitch dark, some large enough for three-person rafts.

Winding through it all is a wavy river where tubers float serenely through the hubbub.

It’s enough to keep water lovers happy for hours, which is good since the admission is $38 a day. You can leave and return as often as you like, although the two on-site restaurants, the coffee bar and, thank heaven, the full-service bar may keep you going all day.

Source: www.delawareonline.com

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