Hold on tight, Logan: Providence man wants to build an amusement park

LOGAN — For a decade, northern Utah has had in its midst one of the great international success stories of the amusement park business.

And now, if everything goes as planned, local residents will be able to personally experience that success.

Local-boy-made-good Stan Checketts, a lifelong resident of Providence and CEO of S&S Power, wants to build a fun park south of Logan that would include such things as a Go Kart track, miniature golf, concession stands — and the extreme, adrenaline-overload rides that S&S Power designs, manufactures, ships and installs all over the world.

The land for the park has been annexed into Logan but has yet to be rezoned to permit the fun park. Checketts would use the park to test his latest and greatest creations on his friends and neighbors. Then, after a suitable period, he would pack them up and replace them with the next big things.

"I love to thrill people," he said. "This would be great fun for people around here."

Checketts' creations include the first man-made bungee-jumping towers and vertical rides like Lagoon's Rocket, which jettisons innocent park goers 185 feet up or down, powered by massive cylinders of compressed air.

Or how about the thrust-air roller coaster, one of which, in Japan, has the fastest thrust of any roller coaster in the world — 107 mph. Or the Sky Sling, a wild contraption suspended with cables between three huge metal poles that throws its occupants far into the air and then leaves them to their own devices.

"This is a very unique business," S&S Power chief operating officer Rich Allen said.

Allen says the park makes no sense businesswise. Cache Valley doesn't have the population base to support such a park, and its warm season is short. But Checketts has built a massively successful business basically by figuring out new ways to have a really wild good time, and he's not going to let a little thing like money get in his way of that ultimate goal.

Ever since he was a kid, the 62-year-old Checketts has liked giving people thrills. Not the stomach-churning, nausea-inducing rides Checketts dismisses as "spin and puke" but honest-to-goodness thrills that come from touching the face of eternity and returning safely.

When he was a Boy Scout, Checketts figured out how to whip a member of his troop high into the air using a rope attached to the top of a barn and eight or nine boys pulling on the other end. Leaders first prohibited it, then discouraged it — then started using it for their own activities.