Anyone who has been to a mountain with a terrain park knows about the park crew. Depending on their level of work at your home hill, you either love them or hate them. Interestingly enough, they also either love or hate their job.
Today, The-House Blog kicks off a new series of park crew confessions — The Digger Diaries. We’re giving you exclusive access to the behind-the-scenes stories of an anonymous digger from an anonymous park crew in America.
The Snowmobile
Most every park crew gets set up with a snowmobile, in order to get the park set-up before the chairs spin and get them around the mountain for all their other important day-to-day duties. The staff at a place in say, the Midwest, with a vertical of 500 feet or so, is not going to have the fun type of sled, because there’s no powder to fight through and no steeps to climb. Big mountains get the goods, especially if their marketing department has wrangled up a sponsorship deal with a snowmo manufacturer.
These big mountain machines are the envy of other departments, who are stuck putting along on trail sleds. Park Crews like to show off how cool their job is at any chance they get, so they’ll race by their co-workers and send the roost into the grill of many unsuspecting ski patrollers and lift maintenance dudes. Once in a while, though, they let these guys rip around on the sleds too though, so it’s somewhat mutually agreeable.
Ever wonder why it takes so long for some parks to get dug out and raked up after a storm? Simple answer — no one likes to work on a powder day, including park crew. You’ll see them riding the peak all morning until it gets tracked. But then they’re mysteriously absent the rest of the time. This is when they’re in the woods too flat for shredding, dropping bars and weaving turns through the trees.
No cliff landing is too flat with 14 inches of travel
At the end of the day, diggers use sleds to take down all those signs that tell you where the park is, remove flags from jumps, and roll up any sponsor banners. The faster this is done, the more time the guys have for sled fun. If the department is blessed with two sleds, impromptu hill climb challenges and races through the boardercross track are commonplace. More experienced sledheads also head to the small-medium size parks to launch some of the jumps. The perk? The snowcats come through and groom out your tracks before any of the bosses get out there the next morning!
Snowmobiles can be a sword with a sharp grip as well. When the pros come to town, and want to session a feature to get some shots or video, they don’t want to ride that chairlift, they want personal tows. It’s cool for about 5 minutes, it’s a chance to meet some guys you’ve looked up to. It gets old quick though, when you’re doing lap after lap of chauffering.
“That’s why everyone on the crew gets their sled time, rookies do the pro tows, and vets get to turn boardercross into snocross,” said our exclusive informant.
