BEND, Ore. -- In years like this one, when the snow piles up in the Oregon Cascades, skiers and snowboarders go flying down the slopes at the Hoodoo Mountain Resort.

But if the ski area owner gets his way, people might be able to fly down the same mountain when all the snow has melted, via an alpine slide, or a zip-line.

Hoodoo has received permission from the U.S. Forest Service to build both a slide, where people sled down tracks that are on the ground, and a zip-line, where people are attached to a pulley system that runs down a suspended cable.

The alpine slide would be about a half-mile long, and the zip-line would start at the top of the Manzanita chairlift and go to the base of the slope, said Chuck Shepard, chief executive officer of Hoodoo.

"We want to do something that takes advantage of the mountain, but we also want to do something that people would come into the forest to do," Shepard told The Bulletin newspaper of Bend. "We have this beautiful lodge and the restaurant and all that, and it just sits there for more than half the year."

For now, the resort is holding off on construction until the company has a stronger financial base to support the investment, Shepard said.

If it does go forward, the attractions could be built in the summer of 2009 or 2010. An alpine slide could cost about $1 million, and a zip-line would cost about half that, Shepard said.

Adding these kinds of attractions to ski areas isn't uncommon, said Steve Otoupalik, wilderness and trails manager on the McKenzie River Ranger District of the Willamette National Forest, where Hoodoo is located.

"It makes sense to try to make their multimillion-dollar facility more of a full-season use. It takes an awful lot of skiers to come through the front door to try to break even," he said.

The Forest Service did an environmental analysis on the proposal and determined that putting up these structures wouldn't cause too much of an environmental impact, since the slopes were already modified as a ski area, Otoupalik said.