As one of the nation’s most-visited ski areas, Breckenridge Ski Resort requires a small army of employees to operate everything that goes on at its five peaks, three base areas and nearly 3,000 acres of skiable terrain. From ski lift maintenance to ski patrol, Colorado Life met seven of Breck’s dedicated crew members to find out what they do to keep the resort running.

 

Adam Pino

Lift Maintenance Director

Skiers and snowboarders at Breckenridge move up the mountain using 24 ski lifts, along with 11 smaller carpet and platter lifts. Adam Pino is the man in charge of making sure all these lifts run smoothly and safely all winter long. His 26-person crew inspects each lift at least twice a day, and they climb each of the hundreds of lift towers for monthly checks.

People often ask Pino what he does in the summer, assuming he has plenty of free time. In fact, summer is when much of the hardest work takes place. His crew visits each tower, lifts the cable, changes out and realigns the wheels and greases the machinery.

Installing new lifts is another summertime job. Because cranes can’t easily get up the mountain, the crew often installs the enormous lift towers using helicopters to lower them onto concrete bases. The toughest lift to install was the Imperial SuperChair, which tops out at 12,840 feet. To get the lift terminal to the very top, they had to use a military Chinook helicopter, whose powerful rotor wash blasted the crew on the ground.

“If you didn’t weigh at least 180 pounds, you had to have rocks in your pockets, because you were going to blow away,” Pino said.

When the Chinook first attempted to place the top terminal on its concrete slab, the wind was too high to get it exactly into place, so the helicopter set the terminal down beside the slab. The Chinook came back when the wind calmed down, but when it tried to pick up the terminal, the helicopter couldn’t lift it because the air was so thin at that altitude. Pino’s crew had to break down the terminal into three huge sections to allow the helicopter to pick up and set the individual sections into place. Then his crew had to reassemble it by hand. It was a success, and the Imperial SuperChair is now North America’s highest ski lift.

 

John Anicito

Snowmaking Manager

Breckenridge’s snowmaking operation literally lays the foundation for the skiing experience at the resort. The mountain may have a 60-inch base of snow during the season, but the critical first 18 inches are usually manmade.

“Without snowmaking, most ski areas wouldn’t be able to operate the way we intend to,” Breckenridge Snowmaking Manager John Anicito said. Snowmaking gets the resort opened in early November and allows it to stay open into May. Breckenridge has four year-round snowmaking employees and 36 seasonal workers who work 12-hour shifts around the clock.

The manmade snow starts as water in the Blue River, which flows through town. Water is pumped through pipes uphill to hydrants located throughout the mountain. Workers hook hoses from the hydrants to snow guns, either the 30 TechnoAlpin T40 mobile fan guns or the hundreds of permanently installed tower guns that run on compressed air.

Both types spray a mist that freezes in midair into snow. The crew can adjust the spray to make the snow wetter or drier. The temperature typically has to be 28 degrees wet bulb (combination of air temperature and humidity) or colder to make snow. The test to ensure the snow is the right consistency? Just make a snowball.

“We aim for a packable snowball that can easily be put together but also easily break,” Anicito said. “If it’s too wet, you pack it and water’s dripping out; if it’s too dry, you try to pack it and it dusts up in your hand.”

 

Dave Mastrobuono

Grooming Graveyard Shift Team Lead

When the snowmakers make snow, it accumulates in big piles known as “whales.” To spread it out evenly over the mountain requires groomers driving snowcats with a blade in front and a tiller in the back. The groomers also work to undo the impact skiers have on the mountain.

“Skiers bring the snow down the hill and to the side,” snowcat operator Dave Mastrobuono said. “We bring it back up the hill and to the middle.”

Each night, 24 snowcat operators work to groom the mountain – half work the evening swing shift, half work the graveyard shift. As graveyard shift team lead, Mastrobuono’s workday begins at midnight, when he climbs into the cab of his PistenBully 600 snowcat.

The snowcat cab is spacious and toasty warm. Instead of a steering wheel, there are separate controls for the left and right tracks. The snowcat has a zero turning radius; when one track goes forward and the other goes in reverse, it can pivot in place.

Though the snowcat resembles a bulldozer, it is much lighter. In fact, its aluminum construction means it weighs as much as just the tracks alone on a Caterpillar D9 bulldozer. Its blade differs from a bulldozer’s, too – it is articulated and adjustable to 12 settings, such as curling to the left or right to push snow exactly where it needs to go.

After using the blade to push snow uphill, Mastrobuono uses the tiller to grade the snow into a smooth, even surface with a distinctive corduroy pattern.

 

Hunter Mortensen

Ski Patrol Director

Each morning, before any skiers or snowboarders are allowed up the mountain, 40 members of the Breckenridge Ski Patrol fan out across the slopes to make sure the snow is as safe as possible. It is a responsibility Ski Patrol Director Hunter Mortensen doesn’t take lightly.

“We are the stewards of the mountain and all the people who come to experience it,” he said.

A top priority is avalanche mitigation. The goal is to make avalanches happen artificially so they don’t happen when people are skiing. The morning after a snowstorm comes through, patrollers seek out new snow drifts. When they see a drift that wasn’t there the day before, he said, that’s when they know they need to knock it down.

For some avalanche hazards, mitigation is as simple as skiing across the top of a ridgeline to release the snow. But in situations where that wouldn’t be safe, there’s only one solution: explosives.

“It’s the newer version of the old-school stick of TNT,” Mortensen said. The 3-kilogram explosives look similar to a stick of dynamite and are a little smaller than an average person’s forearm. They are deployed either by hand using a 90-second fuse, or by shooting it out of the avalauncher – a cannon that works like a pneumatic baseball pitching machine.

When guests arrive on the mountain, patrollers keep on the lookout for people who need help. “Whenever the human body is playing with gravity, there are always things that can happen,” Mortensen said. If someone is injured, patrollers are there with a toboggan to ferry them to medical help.

“When somebody gets injured skiing,” he said, “the most rewarding thing is when they come back later and seek you out, thank you and show you how excited they are to be back on the mountain.”

 

Nina Michel

Ski and Snowboard School Training Manager

The 700 instructors at the Breckenridge Ski and Snowboard School are a diverse lot. Some are young ski bums, but there are also retired generals, psychologists and Fortune 500 CEOs. Nina Michel oversees the training of all these instructors.

Instead of the three R’s, instructors learn the five T’s: terrain (knowing a run’s difficulty level), tactics (which side of a run to go on), traffic (being aware of other skiers), timing (the time of day affects snow conditions) and task (what exercises the students are doing). But that’s just the bare minimum instructors must know.

“There’s a lot more to teaching skiing than teaching skiing,” Michel said. “In any given lesson, instructors can be anything from a life coach to a marriage counselor.”

Learning to ski or snowboard can be a life-changing experience, she said, and it is fun to watch that happen. One of her favorite students was a boy from Scotland who at 8 years old weighed well over 100 pounds and had never been involved in athletics. He struggled to learn to snowboard, but he kept at it, and by the end of his first day, he exclaimed to his father, “You know, Dad, I’m a snowboarder!” His passion for snowboarding turned him into an athlete, and he is now an All-Scotland pro rugby player.

Michel has a shortlist of suggestions for absolute beginners. First, don’t “over-terrain” – that is, don’t attempt runs above your skill level. Second, spend the money on a professional boot fitter; how well ski boots fit goes a long way in determining your success on the slopes. And finally, “in the interest of marital harmony,” never try to teach your spouse to ski – it’s definitely something best left to the pros.

 

Chelsea Roth

Transportation and Parking Senior Manager

Commuting to work on a ski slope is a lot different from most other workplaces. For the majority of Breckenridge employees, it involves riding one of the buses that are in constant circulation throughout the resort from 5:15 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. Once all the employees are at their stations, the buses deliver skiers to the snow.

As senior manager of transportation and parking, Chelsea Roth is in charge of making sure everyone gets where they need to go. “We play a lot of puzzle games each day, depending on where our set routes are and where our volume is,” Roth said. Breckenridge has employee housing both in town and further afield in Keystone. Shuttles pick up employees at their housing or at designated employee parking lots. Parking is a critical element of the operation, too. After all, she said, “You can’t go skiing without parking first.”

Bus drivers need a commercial driver’s license and passenger license. It takes 14 days of training to get those licenses, then another week of route training before drivers are ready to start at Breckenridge.

What Roth loves about her role is being the first touchpoint for guests and employees. If someone needs to know how to get somewhere or what is open, the drivers are there with answers.

 

Pedro Ramidan

Resort Operations Manager

Breckenridge has four ski-in/ski-out on-mountain restaurants. People dining there are usually too focused on enjoying their meals to spend much time wondering how their food got to the top of a mountain with no road access.

Overseeing the logistics of food and beverage service is Pedro Ramidan, resort operations manager. Ramidan is in charge of the warehouse that stores supplies for the entire resort. As the resort starts closing down each day, he and his operations team load pallets of food onto two snowcats and head up the mountain to make deliveries. The front of the snowcat has a forklift, and the back has a cage that can fit four full pallets.

The mountain is big and wide. To get to the farthest restaurant from the resort’s warehouse, Pioneer Crossing on Peak 7, takes 25 minutes. After he unloads the food, he loads the snowcat with the restaurant’s trash and recycling. During busy times, he usually makes seven trips each night.

“When you are up there at the restaurants with your crew, you can see the entire city of Breckenridge and the sunset,” Ramidan said. “The trip is worth it just for the view.”

He doesn’t always have the mountain to himself afterhours. Because the resort is in a national forest, hikers are allowed uphill access outside of operating hours. And he loves it when he encounters moose. “I’m 6-foot-4, and these moose tower over me,” he said. And a particular favorite of his is the fox that lives near the warehouse. The first time he saw it, he was delighted – originally from Brazil, Ramidan had never seen a fox in real life before. “I had only ever seen foxes in cartoons,” he said. “I thought it was going to stand up and start talking.”