Story first appeared in:
It is a frostbite-cold February morning at Winter Park Resort, and Brad Hawkins is on the Mary Jane side as the moon is setting and the sun is coming up.
He’s in a hiding place few know exists even though it is standing in plain sight.
He’s at the controls in a building that sits on top of the Super Gauge Express ski lift, in the nerve center for the mechanism that will soon rumble to life and begin delivering skiers to the start of an exhilarating day on the slopes. It’s 6:15 a.m., hours before the lift starts spinning. Hawkins must inspect each part of the mechanism that carries the 104 chairs on the six-seater detachable lift from the bottom of the Jane to the top and back again before the skiers arrive.
Once the lift opens, it will carry skiers 6,912 linear feet up to the top of the mountain, at times hanging 64 feet above ground. When they reach their destination, they will slide off the chair, buckle their boots and shred whatever Mother Nature sent.
The majority probably wouldn’t be able to tell you why their ride went so smoothly or how their chair, weighing 883 pounds, stayed attached to the 60,000-pound cable that glides gently across three steel wheels atop each of the 22 lift towers. Just as they wouldn’t be able to say who adjusted and maintained all those parts to make the Super Gauge run like it does.
Winter Park operates 23 lifts across its 3,000-plus acres, including three high-speed six-packs, one 10-person gondola, six high-speed express quads, three triples, six doubles, three surface lifts, and one rope tow, drop skiers onto 171 trails linked to glades, bowls, groomers, steeps, almost-flats, kiddie terrain, terrain parks, chutes and moguls that go on and on.
Hawkins inspects and adjusts two to three of them per day. Few skiers recognize him buzzing around on a snow machine fixing this and adjusting that.
He’s the senior manager of lift maintenance, one of Winter Park’s several departments whose employees do a chunk of their work in the hours people aren’t skiing. They’re the unseen army that toils to make every person’s ski day the best.
Their jobs are key to making Winter Park run in a way that can handle tens of thousands of skiers daily with as few mechanical breakdowns, blemished trails, guests left on the lift, guests hiding on the mountain or avalanche-control bombs stolen as possible.
It’s what every self-respecting resort pays a regiment of employees to do, because without them skiing wouldn’t exist as it does. At Winter Park, around 150 people work between the time the lifts close in the afternoon and open the next morning.
The groomers, snowmakers, lift mechanics, lift operators, snow removers, security and ski patrollers who work outside of or beyond resort operating hours say they don’t mind working in anonymity. They do it for things like that moonset-sunrise that greeted Hawkins as he arrived at work Feb. 29.
Corduroy farmers: Snowmakers and groomers
Dave Hagerman likes ptarmigan that burrow beneath the snow only to explode into flight when his snowcat rolls by, while James Schold likes the fox that sneaks around his snowcat, full-moon grooming and eating whatever he wants in whatever quantity during the heart of snowmaking season when he’s burning 4,000 calories a shift.
Their jobs are different but interconnected. Hagerman is senior manager of slope and vehicle maintenance, and Schold supervises the snowmaking team from October to December and then joins the grooming team for the rest of the season. (He knows. It’s confusing.)
Over the course of a season, Schold lugs thousands of feet of hose across Winter Park and Mary Jane, pumping between 105 million and 115 million gallons of water out of the Denver Water Board Canal and turning it into snow, he said. The resort owns shares for 90 acre-feet from the Clinton Ditch and Reservoir Company, which allows it to divert up to 450 acre-feet a year because melted snow is recaptured by Denver Water’s collection system at the headwaters of the Fraser River. “So Denver kinda actually likes us using their water,” Schold said.
Winter Park’s snowmaking system can instantaneously deliver 2,400 gallons of water and 15,000 standard cubic feet of compressed air per minute, making snow in guns that run between 1,000 and 2,000 hours a season. Hagerman said next year, when the resort expands, “it’ll be 6,000 gallons of water and 600 psi a minute.” Denver’s “winter park” was one of the first Colorado ski areas to use snowmaking, installing a system in 1976 that covered 75 acres — now it blankets 280 (258 at Winter Park and 22 at Mary Jane).
Once human-made snow and natural snow cover the mountains, the snowcats move in. Hagerman has a crew of 30 employees with 15 grooming 600 acres per night. His two crews work the resort in two overlapping 12-hour shifts. Some employ special attachments that cut halfpipes. (Fun fact: The late Doug Waugh, who farmed in Berthoud, invented the first halfpipe groomer, the Pipe Dragon, which he built from converted farm machinery. He sold his prototype to a manufacturer in Fort Collins in 1990 who decided snowboarding was never going to take off, so Waugh bought it back. You know what happened next.)
Others use winches to both pull their cats up runs too steep to drive up (like Norwegian, at Winter Park, or the Mary Jane Trail, both with pitches of 30 degrees), Hagerman said, or to arrest their fall, which sounds terrifying. And still others churn chewed-up snow into beautiful snow for skiers always hungry for a clean carving canvas.
One might think, “Oh, that sounds easy. Just cruise around and let the several-hundred-thousand-dollar snowcat work its magic.” But aligning each row of corduroy with the last isn’t no-fail, Hagerman said. His crews work hard to groom without leaving track marks, zipper marks or ridges. But some of the smaller blemishes visible at night can be forgiven, he said, “because you can come back in the daylight and you won’t see it.”
“I mean you could see it if you knew what you were looking for,” Schold added.
Snowcats are expensive: The one Hagerman chugged around in Feb. 28 is 10 years old, has driven 12,000 hours and cost around $400,000 when Winter Park bought it. The one Schold drove is quiet, smells like new leather, has 1,000 miles and costs around $500,000.
But to the consumer paying top dollar for runs that beg your skis to turn, baby, turn, in tight squiggles or long arcs, impeccable grooming is a must. Thank genius ski boss Stephen Bradley, who invented the Packer-Grader at Winter Park in 1951, and ushered in a new era of grooming, because employees could pull the comb-like apparatus behind them to “mow down moguls” on a run, pull it back to the top via a rope tow, and do the job over again, Hagerman said.
And Schold said snowmaking is worth all the effort it takes, because it can be stockpiled at the base of the Mary Jane, which stays open into late spring, and used to keep the trails covered, which keeps the lifts running, which is all that matters to skiers. Amen.
The keepers and sweepers: Ski patrol
This story first appeared in
Colorado Sunday, a premium magazine newsletter for members.
Experience the best in Colorado news at a slower pace, with thoughtful articles, unique adventures and a reading list that’s a perfect fit for a Sunday morning.
Riley McDonough came to the Winter Park Ski Patrol via his dad, Kevin, who was the top brass in the department for 36 years. Kevin has since retired and lives somewhere out West “among the wolves,” Riley said. Riley has been a patroller for 22 years, “including junior patrol.”
Riley had a head start because of what his dad would do when he was a hyperactive 10-year-old badgering the patrollers at HQ. Pops would tell him to go hide in the trees off some run or other. Then he’d send patrollers to find him: practice for after-hours sweep.
The majority of a patroller’s shift happens when the lifts are running. That’s how the employees with the highest levels of medical training take care of so many people. They’ve got the avalanche bombs needed to safely open The Cirque, 399 acres of Winter Park’s most extreme black diamond terrain. They have the toboggans to haul the injured off the hill, whether they’ve broken a neck or a finger. They deal with everything from blown knees to tree strikes to little kids who are sick of skiing and maybe just want some attention from the redcoats laden with radios and medical kits.
But sweep is their main after-hours function, even though it starts mid-afternoon and unfolds in stages until darkness or dusk, depending on the time of season. The first group of sweepers head to The Cirque and Eagle Wind terrain, the two outermost regions of the resort, at 2 p.m. They hit Parsenn Bowl and the Wild Spur area at 3 p.m., since they’re the next closest in. And they scour the “primary mountains, Jane side, Winter Park side,” at 4 p.m, McDonough said.
Each weekday, 16 to 18 full-time patrollers sweep each mountain. On weekends add “some 20-odd redcoat senior-volunteer patrollers,” he added.
Winter Park Resort has 91 professional ski patrollers on staff, including base patrol who work in the medical clinic at the base, said Jen Miller, the resort’s spokesperson. Another 130 volunteer patrollers work weekends and holidays, including 20 juniors, aged 15 to 17.
Every new pro patroller completes about 160 hours of classroom medical and first aid training, Miller said, and returning patrollers complete an eight-hour refresher course every year. Getting schooled up in the nonmedical tasks of the job typically occurs during a patroller’s first season, as a trainee. “After their first year, they complete another 80 hours of operational training during the next three years. They’re considered a master patroller by year four,” Miller added.
And last but definitely not least, meet Biskit, Emma, Gravy and Charlie, Winter Park’s avy dogs.
Biskit and Emma are fully certified in every aspect of being an avalanche/safety/search pup. Gravy and Charlie have some training and certifications they’re working on. The dogs’ humans are all pro patrollers, so the dogs come to work when their humans work. And they’re typically on-call, just like their humans.
But avy dogs don’t sweep, and that is our focus for the moment.
So what are patrollers seeking during their end-of-day scour of the mountain?
“It’s not necessarily finding people that are lost out there,” McDonough said. But every day as closing time approaches, the “daily migration starts, and, like on Village Way, it’s a madhouse.” Also, a resort after hours on a spring day when the trees are starting to emit their woody perfume and the alpenglow is painting surrounding peaks neon pink is a Colorado treat second to none. No wonder some people want to savor every second of it on their way down.
Sweep is a courtesy, anyway, McDonough said. “So if they want to stay, we’re like, ‘Whatever. If something goes wrong, call 911.’” Leaving the resort at a specific time isn’t obligatory. “But we’re like, ‘if you’re drunk and you hurt yourself it’s gonna be a long time before we get to you.’”
Since the invention of cellphones, the number of people lost or injured after the last bell “happens less, however, it happens. So, it’s more making sure slowgoers are making their way down,” he added.
On Feb. 28, multiple groups of patrollers fanned out across Winter Park and Mary Jane, yelling “clo-zing!” as they slowly ski zigzagged from one edge of a run to another. No one screamed from the trees — drunk or lost or otherwise. At each cat track notching latitudinally down the mountain, each sweep group stopped to wait for a patroller on a snowmobile to catch up: another layer of safety. After grouping together for the last time, they ended their day at the Denver Health Winter Park Medical Center clinic at the base of Winter Park.
They were tired. It was time to go. They needed to eat and drink and get a good night’s sleep, because the first shift, which is, generally speaking, the snow safety team’s, had to be back and ready to head out the door at 7 a.m., McDonough said. Although, the snow safety supervisors are up and checking the weather forecast most if not all days by 5 a.m., he added, alerting the crew if they need to head in early to certain spots based on temps and weather conditions.
Protecting and enhancing the assets: Security and grounds
They’re so secretive you rarely ever see them but they’re out there: the security folks guarding Winter Park and Mary Jane overnight.
No one would try to break into a multimillion-dollar lodge halfway up a 12,000-foot-high mountain — or would they?
Recall the Earth Liberation Front setting fire to three buildings and four chair lifts atop Vail Resort in 1998, an act dubbed America’s “worst eco-terrorist attack” in history. Or thieves nabbing an undisclosed number of avalanche-mitigation explosives from a locked storage shed at Winter Park in 2004 — that brought the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to the resort. A spokesperson at the time said resort officials took “preventative measures” to ensure the remaining explosives were secure.
Security more recently hasn’t had to deal with eco-saboteurs or weapons thieves, or even very many after-hours break-in attempts, which are “very rare,” Miller thinks. But they still perform a valuable service: spending nights cruising around the resort checking and double-checking buildings. Then comes another function: When 3 inches of snow accumulates by 3:30 a.m., they light up the phone tree that summons the resort’s on-call snow-removal team.
The first line of defense will come in and start pushing snow into piles, scooping it into dump trucks and hauling it away from the base. Then the hand-shovelers arrive to “clean off, like, the roofs and everything else,” Hagerman said. “All that happens in the hours before skiers start arriving during these snow events.” The early-morning snow-removal crews will strain their backs generally for six hours — 3 a.m. to 9 a.m., when the first whoops and hollers praising another powder day come wafting by.
The general public doesn’t know who the groomers, snowmakers, night security or early-morning grounds crews are, but “they’re the unsung heroes of the resort,” Hagerman said.
Keeping derrieres in chairs: Lift ops
There’s another crew this story of after-hours dedication must highlight: lift ops, the department responsible for levitating people up the mountain.
The lift department is stationed in three places across the two mountains, and 150 full-time operators control the on-the-ground levers that keep the lifts spinning, said Kevin Albinson, lift operations manager.
Throughout the week, first-shift lift operators start at 7 a.m. and the job generally ends at 4:30 p.m. But on Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings the resort sends guests up the gondola for après at Sunspot Mountaintop Lodge, and operators will stay until the last guest and/or food and beverage employee is down.
Lift operators’ main priorities are safety, good guest service, “team play” — working well together — and, of course, keeping the chairlift seats full, for the greatest uphill capacity.
At one time, “lifties” were regarded as the hardest partiers on the mountain, especially years back when skiing and drinking, and drinking and skiing, seemed a fine priority for someone who moved to a ski town with the solitary goal of skiing as often as possible (as this writer can attest).
That’s shifting, Albinson said. “I think between the resorts and our management and our employees, we’re focused a lot on mental health issues these days. So I think they still go out and have their good times and stuff, but I don’t think it’s the same level as it was back even 20, 30 years ago. And we’re pretty strict in making sure that doesn’t happen because of safety.”
Speaking of safety, it’s a major focus of the lift department. Lifties tell you where to stand to avoid being hit by a chair, sweep snow off a chair so your derrier doesn’t get cold, slow the chair to make it easier to get on, grab the random little kid by his chest harness and help him if it looks like he’s going to miss and shovel the platforms on which you load a chair.
Typically, in the morning, they’re rolling in, going to a meeting, getting the safety talk and gearing up for the weather. The bulk of the day they’re delivering people around the mountain. And in the afternoon, when the paying customers are heading off to their parties, yoga classes, hot tub sessions or whatever, lift operators are “trying to get everything done for the next storm that’s coming,” Albinson said. “So, you know, any snow that we don’t get removed that day. Because if nine inches fall tomorrow, anything that’s leftover, now we gotta move twice as much snow.”
But end-of-day operators also have to confirm there is no one left on a lift when they shut it down for the night. That sounds like a no-brainer, but Albinson says it isn’t. People do get left on a lift — particularly on the gondola, because they’re enclosed and “you can’t see in,” he said. “So (the operators) have a procedure where they go into each cabin and look and make sure no one’s in it.” Which is good, because a woman was left in a gondola overnight at Heavenly resort in California last month and it wasn’t pretty.
Lift operators employ the “four C’s” of safety as they shut down the lifts, Albinson said. Close the corral, count the last chair with a person on it and put an orange cone behind that chair so the operator up top can confirm everyone is off.
Then they tear down the corral so the groomers can maneuver around. Meanwhile, the food and beverage people who work at the on-mountain restaurants ride the lift down. “But sometimes there’s stragglers or whatever,” Albinson said. So the lifties have to linger even longer.
James Schold’s midnight manifesto
These night and night-adjacent crews perform some of the most crucial functions at Winter Park Resort, and some of them, like snowmakers, have to really tough it out.
They’re out in the dark or arriving at o’dark thirty every shift, upsetting their suprachiasmatic nucleus — the body’s internal clock. They get colder than everyone else — no sun, which, even when it’s cold, makes a day feel warmer. They shovel in their “breakfast” while others are lingering over dinner. And if they’re a snowmaker, like Schold, they work 10 to 12 hours a night out in the cold, the wind, the snow, the graupel and sometimes rain mixed with snow, moving the machines that pressurize the water that shoots through the hoses to give skiers the most crucial piece of their winter dreams, while most of them never know.
But Schold said he couldn’t be happier getting out of bed when others are sitting down to dinner, or heading to work with his thermos full of hot stew, or putting his snow pants on over his pajamas, while a lot of us are checking out.
“I mean, on any given day, I can run a snow machine, a snowcat, fan guns and ground guns,” he said. “You see a lot of wildlife — basically coyotes and foxes every night. Out here, it’s almost like being on a mirror — on a full-moon night you just about don’t need a headlamp. And the stars. I have beautiful, beautiful pictures of starry nights.”
