Winter 2007-2008
The Mountain Tamers The men who groom the Notch
By Stephen Russell Payne. Photographs by Alden Pellett
It’s two in the morning and 20 below zero. High above the sleeping village of Smugglers’ Notch, Nelson Cushing delicately inches his 16,000-pound “winch cat” down one of northern Vermont’s steepest ski trails, backwards. A taut, half-inch steel cable anchors him to another cat 500 feet above. Arctic winds whip snow against the windshield as he slowly reverses direction and eases the machine’s diesel engine to full throttle. Its steel-studded tracks tear into the deep snow pack, shoving several tons of snow back up the expert trail, filling in gaps and gouges carved between the rocks by hundreds of skiers and snowboarders.
“We fight the same old battle every day,” Cushing says, adjusting the enormous hydraulic front plow. “They push the snow down and off the trails all day and we push it back up onto them all night.”
As foreman of the nighttime groomers at Smugglers’ Notch ski resort, Cushing works high above a cliff-lined, glacial crevice in the Green Mountains that separates Smugglers’ Sterling Mountain from Stowe’s Mount Mansfield. This area acquired its name from the long line of smugglers who used this legendary mountain pass to transport a wide variety of contraband from Canada, most recently whiskey during Prohibition.
Like many who do what he does, Cushing began working at the slopes as a teenager, back in 1966. He grew up in nearby Jeffersonville and started at Smugglers’ at 16, cutting trees and stacking brush. “I wasn’t interested in school,” he says. “I didn’t think I’d get what I wanted in life out of a book. I always loved being outdoors so working on the mountains was perfect for me.”
Deeply ingrained in groomers like Cushing is a respect for what these ancient Green Mountains are capable of: amazing beauty coupled with fierce, even deadly weather that can change in a matter of minutes. Day and night bitter conditions, frozen equipment, uneven trails, blizzards and ice storms conspire against them; yet their work, when done well, goes largely unnoticed. The paradox is not lost on the men: it’s danger in the pursuit of safety. “It’s a big responsibility,” says Dave Williamson, the mountain operations manager at Smugglers’. “My grandkids ski this mountain.”
When Williamson started in the early ’70s, grooming consisted largely of Tucker Sno-Cats dragging around everything from old bedsprings to chain link fence. The Sno-Cats’ fiberglass pontoons were prone to malfunctions in deep, drifting snow and the machine’s high center of gravity caused numerous rollovers. One especially stormy night, a Sno-Cat went off the edge of the Rumrunner trail and flipped end to end, stopped only by the roller it was pulling. Another time, a Sno-Cat crossing the Sterling lift line rolled, slid downhill and flipped, where it remained on its roof after the lift opened.
It was cold, difficult work, even in the best of circumstances. “There was so little heat in those old machines,” Cushing says. “We often drove up the mountains peering through just a small peephole we’d scrape through the ice on the windshield.”
“In the early years the hours were real long,” says Williamson. “During ski season you had to work a hundred hours a week some weeks or they didn’t want you around.” Williamson is a big, burly fellow who started working at Smugglers’ at 14. He’d skip school and go up to the mountain where he’d park cars and collect the Johnson Woolen Mills robes skiers wore on the lifts. He loved working on the mountain so much he hoped he’d get kicked out of school, but his mother made him finish.
What the men really needed back then was a better way to move and manage Smugglers’ nearly 300 inches of yearly snowfall, so Cushing modified a John Deere bulldozer by extending the blade, widening the track and building a makeshift wooden cab over the seat. He stuffed woolen blankets in the holes around the levers to keep out the fierce wind and driving snow. “That was cold, rough work,” Cushing remembers. “We had to bundle up good lest we’d freeze to death.”
If there was an especially heavy storm, it could take up to three days to groom Madonna, Smugglers’ largest mountain: one day to drive the dozer to the top of the 3,640-foot peak and two more to work its way back down.
Today, groomers work together in high-tech machines, as a cohesive team, each knowing exactly what the others are doing. Four or five cats descend a steep slope, staggered in a perfectly synchronized dance, turning together on a dime before they head back up the trail. It’s still not easy work. “Even nowadays it’s hard to find hardy enough people to fix freezing equipment and groom trails in everything from blizzards to ice storms,” says Williamson.
“Even in our fancy modern cats it can get pretty nasty up on Madonna,” agrees Cushing. “If a blizzard moves in fast it’s awful hard to see. You have to make your way along watching the woods line to stay on the trail.” He shakes his head. “I’ve seen huge storms where the snow’s up over the tracks onto the windshield and you end up floating down the hill the first couple of passes till you get it packed down enough you can work with it.”
Cushing’s crew grooms about 150 acres of trails a night on Smugglers’ three mountains, finishing in the wee hours of the morning. Besides the boulders, cliffs, snow- making equipment, pipelines, lift towers and other cats, the groomers must keep an eye open for after-hours hikers who climb the trails in darkness and then ski down in the middle of the night. “Some nights we’ll come over the edge of a steep slope with our plows down, tillers running full blast, snow flying everywhere, and there they are, right in front of you on a trail,” says Cushing. “Every groomer dreads the thought of ever hurting anyone, so those folks really keep you on your toes.”
“There’s been a lot of stress over the years keeping everything going but you couldn’t ask for a better job,” says Williamson. “You’re here in the beautiful outdoors and there’s always a challenge to meet, whether it’s the ever-changing weather, keeping the miles of chairlift cables going, the cats running well or doing maintenance all summer. It never ends.”
“I’d have to say working up here has changed me over the years,” he continues. “When you’re young and working like hell all the time you don’t stop to notice how beautiful it is.” His gruff voice softens slightly. “After 40 years, I make a point every day to stop and look at something beautiful, and it’s not hard to find: the clear blue sky, evergreens loaded with new snow, the trees on the top of Madonna covered with frost.” His face lights up. “I’ve even got my favorite spots where I stop on my machine for a minute and take it in . . .”
A few years ago, Williamson bought a piece of land with a sugar bush on it just across the road from Smugglers’. “I’ve put my life into what we have here,” he says. “I could never leave. When I retire that’s where I’ll be — right nearby.” He pauses and smiles. “But I’ll be working my own schedule.”
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“The Full Nelson”
When you’re skiing at Smugglers’ Notch down Full Nelson, you’re on a trail named for mountain tamer extraordinaire Nelson Cushing, whose prowess in carving out the steep, intense run in the early ’90s earned him immortality on the trail map.
Steve Wry, director of skiing and snowboarding at Smuggs, said Cushing’s work on the trail was a ballet of heavy-equipment excavation, with Cushing operating “from the top down … with nobody holding him or anything …
“The guys on the mountain started calling it the Full Nelson, and the name stuck.”
Wry said Cushing has built all of Smugglers’ trails for the last 15 years, including such runs as Bootlegger, Harvey’s Hideaway, Gary B’s Northwest Passage and Thomke’s Escape.
“He’s the best I’ve ever seen,” said Wry, “and he does it by the naked eye and instinct.”
Going to Extremes
- 8,098: Hours spent making and grooming snow per season
- 130 million: Number of gallons of water used in
snowmaking per season - 4,500: Highest number of skiers in a day
- -38 F: Coldest temp recorded at the top of Smugglers’
- + 100 mph: Highest recorded wind speed
- 8,710: Cups of coffee staff typically drink per season
The Day Shift
After a night of grooming the main mountain, the cats are given an hour or two to rest, a grease and oil job, and then the day crew heads out to groom Smugglers’ four specialized terrain parks. These areas sport a hillside collection of custom-built metal implements known as rails. They vary from the curved S and C rail, fun boxes and battleships, to the long, carved half-pipes and a 12-foot-high wall ride, where daring boarders can pull 360s before descending to the slope again.
Early each morning before light, terrain park manager Mike McAdoo and his crew rebuild huge jumps of packed snow and then meticulously groom the parks to a uniform, corduroy surface. They finish their work by cutting a new surface on the eight-foot-high walls of the half-pipe with their Zaugg, a gigantic, cat-mounted auger attached to a special snow blower that throws snow several hundred feet through the air. Soon the sun comes up over Madonna.
