The intimate bowl at the bottom of Satre Hill was always the best place in the East to watch ski jumping but we worried that after cutting lots of the big old trees and opening up the area, the intimacy might be lost. Not to worry. It's still just as nice and SWSA has added useful new space for parking cars or storing equipment.

For those of you not fortunate enough to make the trip to Salisbury, we thought we'd give you a little tour of the hill. The theme will be "How do the kids get to the top?" Of course some of them choose to climb the stairs by the landing, but others take the lift, a four wheel drive pickup truck that fills with jumpers in colorful suits, then grinds it's way up the newly improved gravel road to the top.

When we walked up the tower on Tuesday afternoon, we discovered that it has not one access stairway but two. One reaches the inrun at the bottom of the curve (red arrow) but the other starts at the very top of the hill and reaches the inrun not far below the starts (blue arrow).

As you look up the hill, the road to the top is on your left. It starts at the new parking area and runs down a gentle slope, then turns right and angles up the hill toward a newly enlarged flat area near the takeoff. But the truck doesn't stop there. Here is the view from near the takeoff as the truck takes a sharp left turn and continues farther up the hill.

This upper road slants first to the left, then to the right until it arrives at a loop just below the base of the new steel tower. Here is the view from the base of the upper stairs as the skiers disembark and hurry to the stairs.

Here is the view down from the base of the upper stairs, showing how much climbing is saved by driving to the very top of the hill. If you look carefully, you should be able to pick out the top of the lower stairs and the coaches in a tall stand to the right of the takeoff, with evergreen trees in the background.

Skiers or workers climbing the tower from the lower stairs have only two-by-four cleats to step on, but wide, luxurious stairs run from the top of the upper entrance to the bottom of the starts.

Here is a view of the tower from the spot where the truck drops off the athletes. The climb from the top of the external stairs to the top of the tower looks long, but almost nobody climbs to the very top.

The hill designer built in plenty of extra speed so, for Thursday's competition, skiers used a start far below the top. However, a few days earlier, in a target jump after Salisbury's annual Eastern competition, Danielle Lussi used every bit of the available speed, starting from the flat area inside of the shelter at the very top, a practice known as "kicking out of the house!"