A Mammoth Job: Grooming the Mountain

“This will be the last pass,” Chad Senior announces on his hand-held radio. With that, he whirls the big snow cat back down the mountain under the starlit sky.

Three other cats follow on his wing in tight formation, each of them plowing the slope, munching moguls in their path, turning the disheveled ski run into a seamless, manicured playground.

“It’s a good night when you get everything looking sweet,” Senior says, his spotlight scrutinizing the neat furrows left in his wake. “And then you can go out and ski it the next day.”

Such is the life of the workers who groom this shaggy beast called Mammoth Mountain. Every night during ski season, which usually runs from November through May, they are on the mountain with their machines, shaving spindrifts, patching bald spots, smoothing ragged edges.

Seventeen snow cats. Two shifts a night. Each one laying down perfect corduroy, as their operators like to say. That’s the look of the finished product after their machines scrape, chop, pulverize, flatten and then feather the finish with a giant comb attached to the back end.

Snow grooming has come a long way since the days when young men attacked the slopes with picks and shovels.

The high-tech machines are the snow-worthy cousins of the agricultural combine, rigged with various attachments for different tasks.

Mammoth has a pair of winch cats, which can be hooked to concrete slabs buried on the top of the 11,053-foot mountain and then lowered by giant cables to groom the steepest pitches.

One of the cats has an attachment known as a Pipedragon that every night gives fresh haircuts to the half-pipes in the skateboarding-inspired obstacle course that allow skiers and snowboarders to catch “big air.”

Mostly, officials deploy mainline groomers who plow as many as 1,000 acres a night, canvassing all of the beginner and intermediate ski runs and many of the expert runs.

“We leave some runs with bumps,” says Clifford Mann, director of mountain maintenance. “And I get a lot of letters about that.” Most skiers, he said, and nearly all snowboarders, want an immaculately groomed run, because it’s easier to ski, and ski fast.

“It’s the product skiers want most,” says Mann, who has worked on Mammoth’s slopes for 35 of his 50 years. “When the snow is soft, we make it harder. When it’s hard, we make it softer. We give them a smoothly tilled, corduroy slope.”

Like other big resorts, Mammoth takes snow grooming seriously--because it has to. Mann and his crews closely watch national surveys for skier satisfaction. Mammoth averages 8.5 on a 10-point scale for skiers’ satisfaction with its grooming. The national average is 7.6.

Part of the reason for such attention is the type of snow that drifts down from the heavens. Unlike the light, champagne powder that dusts resorts in Utah and sometimes Colorado, fresh snow at Mammoth is in a category of its own--affectionately called Sierra cement.

Dense and heavy, the snow tends to last far longer than the fluffy stuff in the Rockies. It’s one of the reasons Mammoth Mountain stays open longer, occasionally offering skiing all the way through the Fourth of July. But it takes more intensive grooming to keep it in shape.

That’s why Senior, 28, is out there on snowy nights as well as clear ones, leading a team of four grooming cats, which lumber on wide tank tracks across the broad bowls that make Mammoth a favorite of skiers from Los Angeles.

A cloud of loose snow swirls around the cat as its front blade scoops a layer of fresh snow into the gaps between moguls.

It’s a cold, clear Saturday night but hard to see the stars with all the snow being stirred up. Windshield wipers slap at the cats’ wind screens and back windows in a vain attempt to keep them clean.

A pair of coyotes lope across the ski run ahead, caught briefly by headlights before disappearing into the shadows. Senior pays them no mind.

“A good operator always has his blade turning over the snow,” he says, showing off his four years’ experience at the controls. He pulls levers and works a joystick, keeping the blade and tiller at the precise depth and cant needed for each bend and twist in the slope.

The tiller mounted behind the cat chews steadily through snow and chunks of ice in its path. A row of metal teeth grinds everything into uniform fine-mesh kernels, which are then finished by the plastic comb.

“Our goal is to have the flattest, most skiable snow,” Senior says, “stuff that will hold a [ski] edge so you can carve a nice turn.”

The work can be monotonous, he says, but satisfying, as similar activity may be for farmers who take pride in plowing perfectly straight rows.

Indeed, at Colorado resorts such as Vail, snow groomers come largely from the ranks of sodbusters. Farm boys who spend their summers behind tractors on the Great Plains migrate to the Rockies in winter to make a little extra cash driving the snow cats.

Here in California, it’s not so much about the money. It’s about living the life. Senior, like most seasonal workers, has that glint in his eye of the hopelessly addicted skier, or in his case, snowboarder. His compensation includes a season ski pass.

Although his 4 p.m.-to-midnight shift cuts into his night life, he has the days free to carve up the slopes he helped coif the night before.

“You’ve got to test the product,” he says, his eyes sparkling. “Quality control.”