Tucked below the imposing welcome sign at the Utah Olympic Park, Jeff Archibald kneels down on the hardened snow, piercing the adolescent snowpack with a drill. Once complete, he places two portable automatic timers near the end of the improvised snowboardcross training hill.

The head coach of the U.S. Snowboarding Snowboardcross team since 2006, Archibald looks up toward the K64 Nordic hill to see some of the sport’s most seasoned veterans and talented up-and-comers training for the impending season.

In years past, the boardercross team would traditionally wait until December to get in legitimate training runs, Archibald said.

Now it’s a little different.

“This is our first year that we’ve worked with the Utah Olympic Park,” he said. “We’re hoping to make it an annual deal, because it’s an insane setup for us. It’s so good for us.

“Just to have these kind of features this early in the season, to start working on real snowboard stuff this early is huge. And it’s in our home base.”

The U.S. boardercross team rents a house in Park City every fall, bringing in its top athletes to train for the upcoming World Cup events, Grand Prix races and other competitions. Archibald and his team took it upon themselves to work on creating a training run in Park City, and some of the sport’s top talent such as Nate Holland, Jayson Hale, Nick Baumgartner and Jonathan Cheever went to work.

The Utah Olympic Park brought in a snowcat, which pushed mounds of manmade snow near the base of the K64 Nordic hill earlier this week. Then, the snowboardcross athletes hand-shaped the ad-libbed drop-in and seven rollers Tuesday afternoon.

“We’re a little different story,” said a grinning Baumgartner Wednesday morning. “We have to sometimes fend for ourselves. We don’t get all the love. We’re not afraid to do the work.

“I wasn’t worrying about shoveling. I pour concrete back home. I can shovel some snow.”

The athletes also hauled a start gate a quarter of the way up the Nordic hill to make this new training area as legitimate as possible.

“It’s pretty cool,” Archibald said. “I think that’s why I like working with this team. That’s how we roll. We have a great team environment. All of these guys are blue-collar, hard-working guys, which I dig.”

And the rollers the athletes shaped and molded aren’t bunny bumps, either.

Holland, a five-time Winter X Games Snowboardcross gold medalist, had a rough go his first time down, catching so much speed that he took a nasty spill in front of the last roller, a spill so hard one the bindings on his board snapped clean off.

“It’s like diving in head first,” said Cheever, who won the U.S. title last year in boardercross. “But it’s going to help us get our bearings greased up right away and faster than ever before. It’s bulletproof.”

The Park City resident said he used the slowest wax ever to touch his board in training due to the speed and difficulty of the rollers.

“I think we’re just trying to get our legs warmed up, more so than anything else,” he said. “Grit your teeth and hold on. That’s the way I see it.”

Fellow boardercross athletes Alex Deibold and Callan Chythlook-Sifsof participated in running and tweaking the training hill at the Utah Olympic Park.

Once the athletes realized they had to move down lower to avoid gathering too much speed, Archibald stood atop a mound of snow east of the hill and began timing them as they tried to top one another getting through their handmade gauntlet.

“It’s hard,” said Baumgartner, the 2011 Winter X Games Snowboardcross gold medalist. “These rollers are as hard as it gets. They’re bulletproof right now. You don’t want to make a mistake.”

Cheever said in years past, the U.S. team began to peak around January or February once the athletes have grown accustomed to the arduous season schedule, while the European boardercross teams were training on snow all summer.

“Normally, we show up to the first race still searching for our legs,” he said. “This is exactly what we need.”

Said Baumgartner: “You can do all you can on dry land, and imitate everything, but nothing beats the real deal.”