Aspen Peak - Niche Media - Aspen living at its peak
Issue link: http://digital.greengale.com/i/601986
As Aspen sleeps… …the mountain is alight as a new generation of groomers prep and pamper the trails they love so much. by amiee white beazley It's a winter evening, mid-February. A light snow is falling. The Silver Queen Gondola sits dor- mant. Buckets hang like a set of dim lights on a wire gathering white dust. But on the mountain, there is a flurry of activity—hidden activity, if not for the lights glowing like planets in orbit against the blackness of night. Here, when the lifts close, Aspen Mountain groomers go to work, laying corduroy 16 hours a night, covering more than 40 miles of trail. I wait as a Prinoth "Bison 350" snowcat lum- bers toward me down Little Nell run, the same slope where fur-clad skiers had power-wedged their way to après-ski just hours before. It would be an intimidating approach—this 10-ton black and gray machine, the blinding headlamps, the growl of the engine—if it were not for a young man waving from inside the cabin. The cat makes a precise turnaround, blade in front, tiller on the back, all power and torque, arriving with elegant muscle as it settles into its stop. The young man jumps out. "Are you here for me?" He is smiling, earnest, and not at all annoyed by the prospect of me join- ing him for a grooming tour of Aspen Mountain, a guided nighttime excursion arranged by The Little Nell. Three nights a week, Aspen groomers bring two guests from Aspen Skiing Company properties—The Little Nell, Residences at The Little Nell, and The Limelight Hotel—on a groom- ing tour, showing them just what it takes to lay a flawless groom. Our tour will inevitably cut into his night's precise schedule on the mountain, per- haps placing in jeopardy the perfection of the tracks he grooms down the celebrity face of Aspen's crown jewel. We hop into the idling cat. It's warm inside, and I'm told to strap on my seat belt. Within moments we're almost vertical, making our way back up the slope from which the cat came, cut- ting through the darkness with the machine's powerful lamps, the controls like joysticks, the dashboard a collection of multicolored lights, the front window a barrier to the cold, a brace for legs when my driver eventually shows me how they groom the steep stuff. There is no one else on the mountain tonight except the wild animals that live here, as evidenced by the patterns of their tracks across already-groomed slopes, and the rest of the crew of groomers, who work every night to bring Aspen Mountain back to cordu- royed perfection by morning. My driver is Brian Kiss, age 21, terrain park rider turned freeskier. He skied 160 days last sea- son, a winter and spring when the snow left much to be desired. Five days a week, Kiss grooms Aspen Mountain on the swing shift from 4 pm to midnight. He's in bed by 2 am, then up for first chair. No friends—nor sleep—on a powder day. People lament the wilting of hard-core ski culture in Aspen, but Kiss is one of a young gen- eration of ski bums proving those death-knell prophecies wrong. He came to Aspen in the fall of 2014 with two childhood friends for a job with the Snowmass parks department, doing hand work, painting, raking, and maintenance. He loved being on the hill all day, but when a rare vacancy with the prestigious Aspen Mountain grooming crew opened up, he threw his hat in the ring. "I wanted this job really bad," he says, "because every day is free to ski." continued on page 52 PhotograPhy © ChiPKalbaCK.Com LIVING THE LIFE 50 aspenpeak-magazine.com