Shaping the slopes: Behind the scenes with snowcat groomers on Mt. Hood

(InvestigateTV) — Oregon’s highest peak is a skier and snowboarder’s paradise, but it wouldn’t be without snowcat groomers.

Snowcat groomers are the unsung heroes of Mt. Hood. They quietly shape the slopes in the dark, night after night.

“The graveyard comes in at midnight and works until 9 or 9 in the morning,” said Allison Marriner, groom manager at Mt. Hood Meadows.

While most of the Pacific Northwest is asleep, Marriner and her fleet of snowcats are working long shifts through the night.

At the highest chairlift is the best part of Marriner’s gig: A sunrise that makes every early alarm worth it.

“We can never beat the sunrise, being on the mountain,” she said. “It’s quiet and no one else is here, and then just you’re up here while the mountain wakes up.”

Marriner says without her crew, the resort would grind to a halt.

“During big powder days, we’re digging out the chair lifts. The chair will get buried,” she said. “Skiers move a lot of snow downhill, so we wanna move that snow back up.”

It’s a never-ending process. Both riders and the wind constantly shift the snow. The snowcats are able to reshape the slopes with three main components: the front blade, the tracks, and the tiller.

“You got the implement on the front, which is the blade. It’s for dozing, grating, moving snow,” Marriner said. “The tracks help process the snow as well, it’s another part that breaks the snow up, then it goes to the implement on the back – the tiller, which has that cutter bar of teeth that spins – that cuts up the snow, breaks it up, then the flaps on the back have that pattern, that notorious corduroy pattern. The corduroy is that finished product that’s that final product, and that surface that people will be skiing on, so it’s extremely important.

After a frigid night, those perfect lines create a stable and soft slope, exactly what skiers and snowboarders love to see.

“I love coming out here and taking stuff that has been torn apart – putting it back together, making it a nice, new surface, and just watching people rip it up. It’s actually quite fun,” Marriner said.

She is on a mission to get more people to join her profession, especially more women.

“My hat - it’s ‘She Grooms,’ an event that we started three years ago, is a conference for women snowcat operators. I’ve been in the industry for 22 years. I remember when I first started talking about how we get more women in mountain operations,” she said. “It’s mostly men, there’s a lot more women than there used to be.”

Representing women on the mountain and the unsung heroes of the slopes.

See more of the snowcat story here.