Those Rugged Mountain Men Who Put Powder On : Snow Makers Keep the Slopes in Shape

The air is so dry it seems brittle. Stars clutter cloudless sky. But because of the blizzard raging, it ain’t a fit night out for man nor beast.

That’s why the men working the graveyard shift at Snow Summit ski area in Big Bear keep stomping into the room marked “Snow Making” to gulp down coffee and chip the ice off their boots and eyebrows.

“Most people don’t even know where (the snow they ski on) comes from,” one young worker says as he stares out a steamy window at the man-made flurries sweeping across the slopes. “They think it just falls out of the sky.”

Such naivete.

This month, clouds finally deigned to dump natural snow on California’s mountains, and resorts from Squaw Valley to Mt. Waterman reported great skiing. But during the peak of the season--from Thanksgiving to New Year’s--nature left California’s slopes colored in rich earth tones, and left resort owners frantic.

In Southern California, however, three ski areas took matters into their own hands.

Southern California ski resorts claim to manufacture more snow than any similarly sized geographic area in the world, and they care for it as if it were powdered platinum.

Termed “snow farming,” this developing art begins when crews plant snow on the slopes and continues as they cultivate it with “snow cats.” Cousins to agricultural combines, the cats tow an array of attachments that would look in place churning through wheat or lima bean fields.

But the agricultural comparison is too pacific for what goes on. In the early days of this season--while the big resorts in Mammoth and Lake Tahoe remained reluctantly idle--the snow-making operations at some local resorts had the look of open warfare.

Actually, at first glance, they looked as if a war had been waged and lost.

Around 11 p.m. at Snow Summit, lights blazed all the way up the mountain. There was no sign of life, though.

Empty lift chairs swung through a loading station and looped endlessly up the hill, creating an unsettling panorama. The lodge and shops and restaurants were abandoned, and the roar of guns spewing geysers of white powder into the wind absorbed shouts of “Anyone here?”

At the base of the mountain, a foggy window in a chateau-like building revealed a scene unexpected among the alpine trappings: Two men seated at a panel containing as many switches and blinking lights as the control room of the Strategic Air Command. Behind them, big yellow generators thundered as they cranked out the power to run the area’s snow making machinery.

Above the power station in the snow makers’ room, men with bright foul-weather clothing partially pealed back and ear protectors hanging on their necks huddled before a large wall map.

Torrents of Powder

The map displays the mountain’s ski runs and more than 400 hydrants containing outlets for water and pressurized air. On a plastic overlay, Rick Sluder, Summit’s snow making supervisor, had drawn in dozens of “snow guns,” 61 of which were currently firing torrents of powder.

A sticker on the bottom of the board reads: “There’s no business like snow business”--a thought that probably crosses the minds of the crew often in the course of a long shift.

“You don’t get cold out there,” one cold-looking young man said. “It’s hard work. You sweat.”

“Yeah, but if you stand still a few minutes it freezes,” someone else added.

Glancing at a gauge showing the system’s air pressure, checking the temperature as relayed from the base weather station and sensors positioned every 200 vertical feet up the mountain, Sluder ordered the men about like a commander positioning artillery.

In response, teams hopped onto snowmobiles and rocketed up the tree-lined slopes. Throughout the night and all the next day, workers moved from site to site, dragging 50-foot sections of 2 1/2-inch orange or yellow hose and positioning the snow guns to which the hose is attached.

A mile or so to the east a similar scene unfolded.

“Last night was probably better--everything went up and came straight down. Now the wind’s blowing it around,” said Paul Bauer, night manager at Goldmine ski area. “We’ll probably do close to a million gallons tonight.”

Several Variables

The snow-making ability of a resort depends on several variables. First the area needs snow guns and the plumbing--usually placed underground--to supply air and water. It also needs a water source and a lot of power, which it can either generate itself, as Snow Summit does, or buy from a local utility.

Finally, the resort needs sub-freezing weather--the colder and dryer the better.

In Southern California, Snow Valley in Running Springs, Mt. Baldy ski area in the Angeles National Forest, Snow Summit and Goldmine in Big Bear, and Mountain High/Holiday Hill near Wrightwood have each invested a lot of money in snow making.

Only the last three of those resorts, however, got favorable weather during the first weeks of this season. So, until the recent storms, they were the only places where people skied. And because they now have a deeper base, they’re likely to have skiing later in the year than other areas.

By a rough estimate, it costs between $120,000 and $130,000 to put a foot of man-made snow on 100 acres, explained Lynne Murphy, of the National Ski Areas Assn., in Springfield, Mass. But more and more resorts--particularly in Southern California and New England--are willing to make that sort of investment repeatedly in the course of a season, in hopes of carving themselves a place in a very competitive market.

Skiers are also becoming increasingly snobbish about the quality of the stuff they ski on, Murphy said.

Improved grooming “makes the slopes safer, makes skiing more pleasant, and allows beginners to ski more difficult slopes,” she said. “In the 1960s skiing was much more rough and tumble. . . . Snow farming is immensely important to skiers.”

Climbing over the wide tank tracks of the Kassbohrer Piston Bully snow cat he’d been operating, Paul Bauer of Goldmine jumped onto a run called Sheep Dip.

It was about 1:30 a.m., 24 degrees, dry and windy. A half moon hung in the sky; the lights of Big Bear lay below.

Bauer slogged over to a snow gun and connected the hoses. He cranked open the water valve. The hose expanded and a cold jet carved a 50-foot arc across the sky.

Bauer twisted the air valve. Roaring like a point-blank 747, the gun aerated the arc of water, which immediately crystallized into snow.

A minute later the cat was lumbering up another run, its windshield wipers beating back the slush smacking the wide windshield from several directions. Even with the cat’s headlights blazing, visibility was lousy. But Bauer knew his way.

“It’s kind of like walking through your house,” he said. “When you get up in the middle of the night and the house is dark, you can still find the bathroom.”

On a run called Hidden Valley, a man with a large red flashlight emerged from the shadows. “Everything’s looking great,” he shouted, his breath steaming. “We’re blowing a lot of good snow tonight.”

Snow Making by Stereo

At Snow Summit, Randy Sprague has been grooming snow for 14 of his 35 years. Seated on a comfortable seat in the heated cockpit of a snow cat, before a dashboard containing a Blaupunkt stereo and enough high-tech gauges to pilot a Lear Jet, Sprague reflected on the continuing revolution in snow farming.

“When I started, grooming was 20 guys with shovels. We’d go out and stand on the moguls and shovel snow back up the hill . . . In the last five, six, seven years things have really changed.”

The purpose of grooming remains the same, though, said Sprague.

“Skiers push snow down every time the make a turn. We move it back up. I’ll spend sometimes 15-16 hours a day pushing snow up the face of a run.”

Groomers also pack and “texture” a slope for skiers by pulling tillers and compression bars over it, and they make sure the snow is evenly distributed. Late in the season, they may even strip one run bare to find enough snow for another.

“At the end of the year, we’re scrimping and trying to find snow everywhere. Same here. I’m scratching inches,” he said. Sprague dropped the cat’s blade and scraped a wide swatch, pushing the snow into a brown blemish on an otherwise flawless slope.

Around 7:30 the sun cleared the ridge and by 8:15 skiers were getting in some of the first runs of the new season. The brush showing beneath the lifts and the brown fields surrounding the lake below were evidence that very little of the white stuff on the mountain was natural.

‘Death Cookies’

Occasionally skiers chattered over ice patches, and here and there they slammed into clods of snow--”death cookies,” one resort spokesman termed them. For the most part, though, the snow creaked beneath the skis like cornstarch.

As Sprague worked his way up a wide run, skiers swooped down the hill and headed straight for his cat.

“They like to play chicken. See ‘There’s people dropping out like flies. It’s hard work, they can’t take it.’

how close they can come,” Sprague said. “If someone ever got caught in the tiller, they’d get ground to mince meat.

“A couple years ago there was a an icy patch (along one of the runs),” he continued, watching out the rear window while backing the cumbersome machine into a small drift. “A whole bunch of skiers hit it.”

One after another the skiers went flailing over the ice and tumbled into the Cat, Sprague said. “I stopped when I saw them start eating it. But probably 30 of ‘em got tangled up under the tiller and blade. It took the ski patrol 30 minutes to get them all out.”

Sometimes, when the hours take a toll on his concentration, Sprague pulls the cat up on “the wall”--Summit’s steepest run--and kicks his feet up on the dashboard. “It’s like sitting in a rocket on the launch pad, watching the stars,” he said.

” . . . The longest shift I worked last year was was 34 1/2 hours. My average shift is 12 to 14,” he said. “I’ve had three girlfriends I almost married who left me because they didn’t like me being out all night.”

Earlier, in Summit’s snow making room, some of the younger crewmen coming off of an all-night shift grumbled and chattered about the toughest job most of them have had.

“There’s people dropping out like flies. It’s hard work and they can’t take it,” said 20-year-old Eric Reicherter, of Palos Verdes, who had just logged his fourth straight 14-hour day.

Season Passes

But those long hours can mean paychecks of $1,000 every two weeks, he said. And snow makers get season passes for the lifts, free ski rentals, and a meal ticket for every 12-hour shift.

So when Sluder asked him to go out for a few more hours, Reicherter began pulling back on the layers of clothing he’d been peeling off.

“It’s another free meal ticket,” he said, adding that earlier in the season high temperatures kept the crews from blowing snow--and the loss of income has kept his refrigerator rather bare.

“But I don’t blame him for that,” Reicherter said, nodding at his boss, who was again standing before the map, alternately talking on two telephones and into a microphone to crewmen manning the guns. “He’s not God. He can’t change the weather.”