Lead Operator Scott Davidson was coordinating the 11:30 p.m. to 9 a.m. shift April 12. The grooming team uses Prinoth Bison Xs: 21,0000-pound behemoths with more than triple the torque of a car.
They drag a tiller, the flexible rake that lays down corduroy. If that was the only thing to worry about, snow grooming would be a Sunday drive.
“When I was younger, and taking these trips out west, I’d see the cats. I figured they were just out mowing the lawn every night,” Davidson said. “35 years later, now I'm doing it. And I’m like, ‘There's a little more to it.’”
In front is the blade—the trickier part. It requires “constant operator input,” Davidson said, as he angles the blade at a rock in the cat track and kicks it away with a wing. With its wings extended straight, the blade is almost 18 feet long.
Like any job, snow groomers speak their own language. Davidson said skier traffic creates “dishes”—humps and low spots on trails that should be flat.
“And that's just kind of what I'm looking for and scanning for all the time, just to see where I need to maybe pick up a little more snow in the blade, or if I need to cut down the edge of something,” he said. Flattening and moving that snow is what the blade is for.
Groomers also have to watch the slope they’re on, snowstorms permitting. Crossing the fall line, which is the path a snowball would roll down a slope, can be risky.
“We'll be working snow from one sideline to the other, or in the middle, and sometimes … you take off sliding downhill and won't be able to climb back up,” Davidson said.
Deer Valley’s regular snow cats can ascend and descend 45-degree slopes and cross fall lines up to 37 degrees. And then resorts have groomers specially equipped for steeper pitches, called winch cats.
They rappel down slopes from an anchor. That anchor can be a metal pole, or it can be another snow cat.
Deer Valley has three winch cats, 19 regular groomers, three utility work cats and a PistenBully 400. Davidson said, to service the resort’s new East Village expansion, the fleet and grooming staff must nearly double.
Currently, the resort employs 50 groomers who work 13-person shifts. That’s a combined 182 hours of grooming every night consuming 1,000 gallons of diesel.
Their machinery is lit tail-to-tip. That, plus their 104-decibel roar—equivalent to your average rock concert—means run-ins with mountain wildlife are few and far between.
But inside the cabin, it’s quieter than a car. And Davidson says the sunsets and sunrises never get old.
