If there’s a buzzword echoing through terrain parks, it’s “progression.”

Resorts are spending more time creating environments where skiers and riders can ease into the park scene, and once there, move ahead safely.

So, what’s progression?

“At its core, park progression refers to increasingly difficult features, regardless of whether they are metal rails, boxes or jumps, as a skier or snowboarder makes their way down the trail,” said Mount Sunapee, New Hampshire’s Marketing Director Bruce McCloy.

McCloy spells it out for those not up to speed on on those rollers, berms, gaps, and more.

He says a series of these features that run downhill one after another is called a “line.”

“As skiers and snowboards progress down the slope, the features found within these lines get increasingly difficult. By designing a terrain park in this way, the athlete is able to build upon their momentum from the previous feature and know if the upcoming one is beyond his or her skill level,” he said.

According to McCloy, this design also allows them the ability to “session” a feature, meaning continually using one particular jump or rail in order to improve their skill. Once they have mastered that feature from their session, the athlete can progress to the next jump or rail in the line.

Changing that line makes things interesting for terrain park users.

In the White Mountains of the Granite State, Attitash Terrain Park Manager Bryan Desgroseilliers is stressing constant change in its parks, switching elements so guests aren’t always skiing or riding the same features, in the same spots, all season long.

“So mixing it up a bit and giving more variety and options as far as what will be offered to guests,” he said. “The parks will change hopefully once a month.”

Nearby Bretton Woods is also looking ahead.

“Again, progression is our main focus here at Bretton Woods,” said Freestyle Terrain Manager Brad Shedd. “We offer everybody the chance to try out freestyle riding for the first time, and also give everyone a great training facility to take it to the next level.”

Then there’s Mount Snow in southern Vermont with Carinthia, the only all-park mountain face in the Eastern United States.

It encompasses 100 total acres of terrain with several different terrain parks ranging in size from small features to extra-large features, including a 400-foot-plus superpipe with 18-foot walls. With almost 150 different terrain park features at his disposal (all custom-built at Mount Snow), Freestyle Terrain Manager Day Franzen and his crew of park rangers spend the winter reshaping, rebuilding and refreshing this unique freestyle playground.

“We’ve got a great thing going here at Carinthia. Our goal has always been to get more people enjoying the parks and I think we’ve done that through progression by design,” said Franzen.

The freestyle movement began at Mount Snow back in 1992 when Un Blanco Gulch opened as the first terrain park the East Coast had ever seen. Since then, the resort has maintained its commitment to offering innovative freestyle terrain, culminating in 2008 when officials decided to dedicate the entire mountain face of Carinthia to terrain parks. Inferno, Carinthia’s extra-large feature terrain park, is the only park on the planet to have hosted both a Winter X Games and Winter Dew Tour slopestyle event.

New for this season, Carinthia is introducing a terrain park called The Farm. “A lot of terrain parks are going urban, but with The Farm we’re going rural,” Franzen said. The features in this new park will be modeled after things commonly seen all over the Green Mountain State like barn and sap buckets.

That’s progressive in the state that launched Ben and Jerry’s.