On a typical work day, Len Sowden gets up at 6 a.m. He climbs into a Ford F-250, picks up a group of his co-workers and, after a quick stop at Tim Horton’s, trundles up to Marmot Basin.
Sowden is the assistant lift and building supervisor at Ski Marmot Basin. He and the rest of the 10-person crew are responsible for maintenance and upkeep at the ski resort, but in reality their jobs revolve around the hill’s seven lifts.
In the winter, Sowden and the rest of the crew spend the first two hours of the workday inspecting the lifts and getting them up and running. At 7 a.m., he and four or five other crew members hop on snowmobiles and scatter across the hill.
On Nov. 18, with the sun peaking out from behind the mountains, the mercury dips to -9° C at the bottom of the School House chairlift.
Each morning, at every lift, a crew member goes through a checklist containing more than 20 points. The safety check includes things like inspecting the emergency brakes, making sure the backup diesel engine is running and ensuring the emergency stops work properly.
Working from the list, Sowden hurries back and forth between the small operating room, the engine room and the landing platform outside, recording numbers and ticking off boxes as he goes.
The whole process takes 20–30 minutes, and as he gets close to finishing, he’s already sweating—complaining that he’s wearing too many layers.
“Our goal is to have everything done by 9 a.m.,” Sowden says. “It’s a mad dash.”
He finishes up his checks and hops back on the sled, taking off to the top of the mountain to find the Paradise chairlift. Across the hill, snow guns hum as they blast out a fine mist of snow.
As Sowden motors up a steep section, the sun hasn’t quite cleared the mountain peaks, and a sliver of moon bounces into view. By the time he gets to the top, a vibrant orange swath cuts the sky.
As he jumps off the sled, he pauses to gaze at the sunrise.
“Normally we’re zipping around all over the place, and you just take it for granted after awhile. [But] this is my life. Every morning, right?” He turns away and offers a wide grin, raising his eyebrows tilting his head slightly.
A few minutes later he clambers up the ladder into the Paradise engine room, rattling off specs and features of the state-of-the-art lift. He talks quickly, and his voice rises slightly as he walks the room, pointing out different features.
“We basically bought a Cadillac,” he says of the lift.
Pulling out a large hammer, he circles the room pounding on the tires that the lift cable sits on, checking to make sure they are all properly inflated.
“Nothing here is light,” he jokes, opening up a tool box to display a pile of comically large lift maintenance tools: a 41-millimetre wrench as long as his arm; a sturdily welded but garishly ugly custom-made mallet; a “hammer wrench” that’s so heavy the only way to use it is to whack it with a hammer.
The Paradise chair is Marmot’s newest, and the safety check is done much more electronically. As Sowden works through the failsafe list, a series of green circles light up on a display in the control room.
There’s 20 items on the list, but Sowden points out that those are only a fraction of the total failsafes built into the lift. He guesses that there are more than 100 different security measures that can automatically stop the engine.
“There’s 100 reasons why this lift won’t run, and that’s a good thing,” he explains.
Later, sitting in the control room of the Rocky Mountain Express, finishing up his safety checks, he buzzes the alarm twice, the universal signal that he’s going to start the lift. The response comes back quickly, but Sowden hesitates.
He picks up the phone and calls down, checking to make sure everything is OK. Later, he explains that the response came back quickly and felt funny, so he called to make sure it wasn’t an enthusiastic lift operator answering back while a mechanic was up in the engine room poking around.
After finishing his checks, and while he’s waiting for the operator at the bottom of the lift to finish their checks, Sowden reclines in a plastic chair and talks about the importance of safety.
“Basically I’m searching for a reason to shut this lift down. Not because I’m mean, and not because I don’t want it to run, but because that’s what we have to do.
“The sooner we can catch a problem, the better it is for everybody. If we can catch it before it goes, that is our goal.”
When he’s staring blankly at the engine, or standing outside gazing at the chairs as they wind by, he’s actually inspecting—looking for anything out of the ordinary, or something to signal the need for mechanical work.
After all the lifts have been checked, Sowden zips around the mountain completing a few minor tasks, before stopping at the Lower Chalet for breakfast from the cafeteria: two eggs, bacon and a pile of hash browns.
It’s just after 10:30 a.m., and he sips his energy drink contentedly.
“Today so far was pretty awesome. None of the lifts went down, the startup went pretty good—we had an awesome morning. It was basically the best kind, in my opinion.”
He explained that even though the goal is to keep the lifts spinning all day, it’s not out of the ordinary for them to stop. Usually it’s the result of an operator error, or a guest disembarking incorrectly, but sometimes it’s mechanical.
“It happens, and that’s a good thing,” he says. “When the lift breaks down it basically may have saved someone’s life.”
Once he’s done breakfast he will spend a large part of the day doing rounds—hanging out in lift engine rooms and keeping an eye on things to make sure everything is running smoothly. After the rounds, he generally picks up a work order from his supervisor and completes some kind of maintenance project.
At 5 p.m. he finally gets to go home.
The maintenance crew works four 10-hour shifts a week, meaning the days they work are spent almost entirely on the mountain. On the days they don’t have to work, most of them are at the hill boarding or skiing anyway.
“We’re here constantly; we spend our lives here,” Sowden says.
Because they spend so much time on the hill, and because they work year-round, many of the mechanics feel a strong sense of ownership and connection to the mountain. Listen to Sowden talk about the lift engines for a few minutes, or tour the newly built maintenance facility with him, and that attitude shines through clearly.
He and the rest of the crew call themselves the “men in black.” The light-hearted moniker refers partly to their mostly black uniforms, but also reflects the kind of subtle pride many of them take in their work.
Earlier in the day, as he looked out over the mountain, Sowden reflected on his job.
“People don’t realize, but we’re here,” Sowden explains. “We’re not seen, we’re just kind of in the background, but without us this place wouldn’t run.”
Trevor Nichols
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