For
most people, a day at the ski resort ends around 4:00PM. But for a few
twilight warriors, the day is just beginning. If you’ve ever wondered
what it’s like to be a groomer, here’s your chance to get a sneak-peek
into a “Night in the Life of a Snowcat Operator.”
Your job
is to spend the night undoing what the skiers spent their day doing. You
cut off bumps, you fill low spots, you move snow back uphill and toward
the center of trails. You resurface and refresh the snow, so that the
skiers can enjoy it all over again the next day. Your job is both art
and science. You’re a “rookie” for at least 4 years, and you’re not a
veteran for many, many more. But you are a groomer, and you have the
best job in the world!
It’s 3:45 pm, and you arrive at vehicle
maintenance shop for your swing shift. After you punch in, it’s time to
review the night's grooming plan. Your supervisor has outlined your
assignments, and you have a short window to ask questions or get
clarification on grooming tasks or special projects before he heads home
to sleep like the rest of the world. Once your tasks are clear, it’s
time get your machine running and warmed up. But first things first:
pre-operations inspection.
You take a walk around the machine,
looking over the track belts, grousers, tires, sprockets, and frame. You
have a look at your blade frame and hoses, and your tiller lifting
frame, tiller hoses, and the tiller itself. You check your motor oil,
hydraulic oil, and coolant, and you’re sure to unplug your block heater.
Driving off while still plugged in can have shocking results after all.
And now it’s time to fire the old girl up. If it’s below zero, you may
have to crank on it for a while, but never more than 30 seconds at a
time. You don’t want to burn up a starter. Once she’s running, you take a
quick look/listen/smell for anything unusual, then you head back into
the shop for 10 or 15 minutes while the cat warms up, and you chat with
the mechanics and fellow groomers.
It’s about 4:45 pm, and you finally hear
the call you’ve been waiting for: “sweeps are down and the mountain is
clear.” That means patrol has finished the end-of-day trail sweeps or
closing procedures, and the mountain is cleared for snowcat activity. So
you hop in, release your brake, and head toward the hill. You’re
starting with the race trail, since race coaches always want hard
snow--the earlier you groom it, the longer it has to set up. You may be
heading out with a fleet of other machines and operators, or maybe
you’re going it alone. Either way, you knock out that race trail first.
If there’s fresh snow and you’re not
winching, you might find yourself sliding down the steeper pitches.
You’re nervous at first, but soon you’re “yee-haw-ing” your way down,
catching up to your slides and steering as necessary with your blade and
tiller. And you might even make a mistake or two. But since you’re a
good operator, you take the time to fix your “oops” moments, whether
it’s a blade dive or your tiller spilling out a small windrow.
Once the race trail is out of the way,
you’re heading for your other tasks. Each trail has its own character,
and you learn the best patterns for each trail and each type of
condition. Usually you’re working high-side to low-side, but every now
and then you have to bring some snow back up from the low side. Some
trails have so many fall-lines you have to flip a coin to decide which
side to start on. Others you find come out best when you skip-pass.
You’ve discovered that skip passing works great in fresh snow to avoid
leaving ridges or windrows. To skip-pass, you start your first pass
uphill. Your downhill pass, however, does not connect to your uphill
pass. Instead, you “skip” over about a half-pass. Then on your next
uphill pass, you climb up in between the two finished passes. Uphill
passes are easier to leave clean than downhill passes in fresh snow,
especially if there’s any side hill involved. You’re always looking in
your mirror to make sure your corduroy “pattern” looks clean and smooth.
But then again, the snow might be nasty
hard pack, and it’s all you can do to get your blade into it. You look
in your mirror, and all you see are grouser marks; time to adjust your
tiller and your blading. You remember what you learned from the veteran
groomers: that “you’re not a real operator unless you’re consistently
carrying a full blade of snow.” So you focus a little more on good
blading, breaking the surface and carrying a roll of snow in front of
you. It’s probably coming up a little chunky, but after scraping against
the blade screen and being crushed under your tracks, your tiller is
ready to work with it. So you start to think about your tiller. You need
a good depth to make sure you’re processing enough of that hard pack to
leave a long-lasting corduroy surface, but you don’t want to go too
deep or you’ll leave ridges on the sides and the center of your pass.
While you usually want to keep your tiller speed a little lower in soft
snow, the hard pack is just not cooperating. So you crank that tiller
speed up until your pass looks smooth and homogeneous. Off you go. But
when you look in your mirror, it’s still not great. The only thing left
to do is slow down and “half-pass” by overlapping about halfway onto
your finished passes. And then you crawl along, grouser-by-grouser. But
your grooming is good, and the skiers would be glad for your patience,
if only they had any idea at all just how much effort and thought it
takes to provide good grooming in tough conditions!
Under the worst of conditions, you may
have no choice but to do a full trail “rebuild.” So you dig your blade
aggressively into the “snow” and tear it up. It comes up in big chunks
that *POP* up in your blade as the surface fractures. You work your way
up and down the trail, moving snow back up and toward the center. You
carry a big windrow back and forth, and you track it all up. Then you
drive away for a while to let it set up. Later, you can come back and
finish grooming it. It was arduous work, and hard on the cat. But you
did it: you turned “ice” back into “snow.”
Around 8:00 pm, the shift foreman is
getting hungry and calls for a “lunch” break. You probably have a
favorite lunch spot, either at an unlocked on-mountain warming hut or
lodge, or maybe just back down at the shop if you’re at a smaller
mountain. Either way, it’s time for a break. And since groomers don’t
usually take any other breaks, its might be a little more than the usual
half-hour. You enjoy your lunch, catch up with some fellow groomers,
compare your thoughts about the snow surface, strategize for the rest of
the shift, shoot the breeze about the Super Bowl, maybe have your
evening cigarette, and just kick back a bit. Every once in a while, it
dawns on you anew that you’re getting paid to spend the night in the
mountains, on the snow, in a $300,000 powerful machine, with comfy a
Recaro Racing seat, a powerful heater, and a nice stereo. All while you
expend your energy on your passion: snow and skiing! Life’s pretty good;
infinitesimal paycheck notwithstanding.
About 8:45 pm, it’s time to get back to
the grind to finish up your assigned part of the grooming plan. Lunch
revitalized you a bit, so you attack the next trail with a renewed
energy. But it’s getting late, and the fuel pump is calling. By around
11:00, you’re heading back for the shop. You get in line at the fuel
pump, and wait your turn. When you get the pump, you start refilling
your machine. You grab a shovel and clear snow and ice off of the blade
and blade-frame, the tiller, and the back platform or doghouse on the
cat. You might take a look in the sight glass for your hydraulic fluid
to make sure you didn’t lose any during the shift. Snowcats are
notorious for hydraulic leaks. You give the cabin a quick wipe down. And
then you hear that unmistakable “click.” Pump is finished, your tank is
full. You put the fuel cap back on, and fill out the fuel log. You
pumped about 45 gallons of diesel fuel to refill. Then you head back to
your parking space, plug in your block heater, and shut down the cat. No
need to wait for it to cool down… it cooled down as you were pumping
fuel. You go inside and fill out the shift paperwork, signing off on the
terrain you covered. You might need to fill out a work order if you had
any bugs with your machine.
Your grave shift colleagues are arriving
for their midnight-8 am work, and you fill them in on anything they need
to know for their shift. At the stroke of midnight, you punch out, and
head home for a cold beer followed by a good night’s rest. When you get
up the next morning, you have the whole day ahead of you while the rest
of the world works. What do you want to do? Ski all day? Catch up on
that remodeling project you’ve been putting off? Sleep in? Watch TV? The
day is yours, until around 3:30 pm when you hop in the truck and head
back to the shop to start it all over again. You are a groomer, and you
have the best job in the world.
by
Patrick Torsell, Director of Marketing & Sales at Ski Cooper, CO
(former Grooming Supervisor, and 2015 Colorado Ski Country USA Groomer
of the Year, 2009 CMC Ski Area Operations Grad)
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