Night Shift.
The unsung heroes shaping world-class snow features while you sleep.
From ISSUE 105 2023
Words Justin Henehan| Images Troy Tanner.
Night has fallen on Mount Cardrona. Frost clings to chairlifts as they stand like steel sentinels against the cold, black sky. Atomised ice crystals swirl in clouds of misty light as a snowcat emerges out of the gloom.
Shaw Butterworth, head terrain park groomer at http://cardrona.com looks through the window of his snowcat. Red laser markers bleed bright red lines on faintly luminous snow. Shaw glances down at the screen beside him. Coloured blotches and rhythmic lines on the monitor trace the terrain, washing the snow-cat’s cab with pale light.
“So, I’ve got my marker over there, which is about 45 feet. And I’ve got my topography lines on the computer, so I know if I’m pointing in the right direction. And Duggie pushed me a nice little pile, here. I reckon it’s the perfect amount of snow. We just need to shape it.”
Shaw is working through the plans for the park, deftly shaping and compacting mounds of snow into booters and landings with the snowcat’s shovel. Shaw loves this work; it’s like therapy to him, he says. It’s also a team effort.
"with the rising sun comes the excitement and trepidation of testing.”
“It’s always such a blessing to get back here. The guys I work with, I love. I love them to death.”
Every winter, the 20-plus-strong crew of park crew, builders, groomers and fabricators can be found toiling through the night to get features ready for the next snow season. Getting the design right is very much a team effort, says Matt Slocombe, Cardrona’s terrain park supervisor.
“I think it’s very important that everyone is involved. It’s a democracy,” he says with a wry smile. “We’ll take a vote on the designs, then I’ll get on SketchUp and draw it up, to make it nice and easy for the cat drivers to know what to do with the snow.”
The crew gets the features in place, sometimes with the help of one of the snowcats, shoving and tweaking the red-welded structures with shovels until they’re straight and level. The snowcats are busy mounding and pushing snow into place, sculpting take-offs and landings to the point where the crew can come in with rakes and add the finishing touches.
Even that is a team effort, with each of the crew eyeing the work, offering a thought or two. You need that second set of eyes, Shaw explains.
“Getting someone to look at a jump for the first time, they kind of look at it differently than when you’re just going backwards and forwards on the same ramp for an hour. Nobody’s so proud to think they’re the best, or that they don’t need anyone else’s opinion.”
It’s not until the sky starts to show its first glimmer of dawn that the full scale of the night’s work is revealed. And with the rising sun comes the excitement and trepidation of testing. All the features are tested by the crew before they’re opened to the public, Matt says.
“I think it’s pretty important that if you’re on the crew, you’re able to hit most of the features —if not all the features—in the park, so you understand all the angles and what needs to be adjusted, if anything.”
For Shaw, there’s no point in going home when the crew is testing in the morning. He’s usually up, peering out the window with bloodshot eyes. But the benefit of a tight team, where everyone works closely to get everything honed to perfection, is that there’s a lot of trust. That trust goes both ways, Shaw says.
“I owe much of my success and joy to the park crew and everyone involved...” – Nico Porteous.
“You want to get it tested and just know, ‘yeah that’s sweet’,” Shaw explains. “Jack (Spence) is the man for that. He’s an integral part of the whole design.”
Jack, the crew’s second-in-command, looks down the groomed corduroy snow towards where the first big jump would be. The slope of the hill hides the take-off, bending down towards the base area buildings and a sea of cloud. He’s nervous as he sits on the run-in, as the bright morning light throws everything into exaggerated contrast. He drops in, picking up speed as he weaves towards the take-off. As he floats off the lip, the landing approaches and passes, his arms pulling at the air to avoid over-rotating his 360.
“That was about 30 feet too deep,” he says. “That’s the deepest test I’ve done so far. Now I know I need to go a little bit lower, but the jump itself is really good.”
Jack’s second test run is smooth, touching down lightly on the sweet-spot of the landing.
“I have a lot of trust in Shaw’s jumps,” he explains. “When you’re testing a jump that’s 80-85 feet, you want to know that it’s going to be nice the first time you hit it. It’s a very big jump and really high consequence.”
It’s just one of many features the Cardrona crew will build and test, from the beginner lines of Lil Bucks, to the jibs of Stag Lane, the intermediate jumps of Antlers Alley, the larger park features of Big Bucks, and the 15- and 22-foot mini and Olympic half pipes. With such a world-class array of features, it’s easy to see how the park crew has helped establish Cardrona as the southern hemisphere’s premiere freestyle facility.
Freestyle skier and Olympic champion, Nico Porteous agrees, saying the park crew are the backbone of freestyle skiing and snowboarding in New Zealand.
“I owe pretty much all my success and joy that I’ve got out of skiing to the park crew and everyone that’s involved in that: the groom drivers, the maintenance boys, it’s incredible. I guess all I can say is a massive thank-you and I hope I do all your hard work justice by shredding the features as hard as I can.”
The crew takes a lot of pride in the features they build. If they’re not perfect, they’re not right, Shaw says. It can become an obsession.
“We’ll finish work and we’ll sit there and talk about snow cats, and jumps and snow for like another two hours. I’d do it 12 months a year if I could. I couldn’t picture myself doing anything else.”
“There’s just an energy about it, like, ‘yeah I’ll stay up all night building jumps, no problem, happy to do it’,” he laughs.
