Untouched powder snow is the stuff dreams are made of for many skiers and riders. But being the first to lay down a deep arc on a buttery-smooth groomed slope is just as satisfying for others.
And while Utah is renowned near and far for its consistent, foot-plus dumps, thanks to the hundreds of nocturnal hours logged by snowcat operators across the state every night, the mountain resorts here have also established a stellar rep for producing some of the most velvety, carvable groomed snow you’ll find just about anywhere.
We teamed up with local photographer Will Saunders who spent an entire night in the dark with both the Park City Mountain and Snowbasin cat drivers. These photos give us a much greater appreciation and respect for that morning corduroy we all love to ski.
There are dozens of techniques used in slope grooming, says John Neuhauser, Park City Mountain’s trail/slope grooming manager, which vary based on snow conditions and the terrain being worked. But in a nutshell, it all comes down to the snowcat operator, who constantly manipulates the blade (the plow on the front of the snowcat) and the tiller (the rear finishing implement) while grooming a slope to precisely shave the snow along the naturally undulating terrain and achieve the ideal corduroy surface. You know, kind of like your favorite corduroy pants from the ‘70s.
Snowbasin carries with it, a Winter Olympic legacy, and has carried the highest standard in grooming since hosting the world in 2002. 50 runs on average are groomed per night, or 500 acres, smoothed over by a team of 13. Snowbasin boasts the men's Olympic Downhill (Grizzly Downhill course) which requires a winch cat at a 74 percent slope. That's steep. This is 2,941 vertical feet of grooming from the top to the base.
Every night at Deer Valley Resort, 10-13 members of the resort’s 33-strong grooming staff buff out at least 60 of the resort’s 101 runs. This commitment to perfection has earned Deer Valley no. 1-in-North America accolades for grooming from the readers of SKI magazine every year for the past decade. The longest run is 2.8 miles, top of Northside Express to bottom of Sultan Express (Ontario, Homeward Bound, McHenry’s, Sultan Connection) and is regularly groomed. On any given night 10-12 cats are used to groom 50-60 percent of all terrain on any given night.
Deer Valley is hardly alone in its dedication to slope maintenance. Solitude Mountain Resort grooms 49 (625 acres) of its 77 runs on a nightly basis. At Sundance Mountain Resort, 23 of 45 runs are manicured every night. And even at Alta, where skiers from around the world converge for the steep and deep, 40 of 116 runs are groomed regularly between a team of 10-12 people and cats. Alta winch grooms 6-8 runs each night in the steepest terrain.
But it’s the United State’s largest mountain resort, Park City, that takes the quantitative cake for nightly slope prep. There, 120 of the 7,300-acre resort’s 300-plus runs are groomed most nights of the winter season; the most overnight grooming completed at any single resort in the Western Hemisphere. A Herculean task executed with a keen eye for detail as well. “Where some resorts just do one groomed track down the center of a run,” Neuhauser says, “we take pride in grooming wall-to-wall, laying fresh corduroy across the entire trail.”
So, this winter, on those days between storms, perhaps rather than hitting the snooze button you’ll be the first in the lift line. And the first to glide down those long, perfectly silky, groomed rows of The Greatest Snow on Earth.
