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Before the lights went out at 9 p.m., January 26, one last skier made a descent down Mt. La Crosse in La Crosse, Wis. The ski patrol sweeps the hills before the lights are shut off. (Photo by Danielle Topka/Winona360)

 
Rob McCollough and Erik Strangstalien sit inside a sparsely furnished, worn shed at the far edge of the parking lot at Mt. La Crosse. As 9 p.m. approaches, seats on the two running chairlifts ride empty up the hill as the last skiers and snowboarders take a final run.

The men begin to stir.

McCollough and Strangstalien are two of a three-man team that makes snow and grooms the ski hill after patrons dust off their jackets and head home for the night. It's a long and sometimes lonely job that requires battling below-zero temperatures and ornery machines, but one the men enjoy for varied but simple reasons. And stick with: Strangstalien has worked at Mt. La Crosse since he was in high school.

“It’s not the same routine every day,” McCollough said. “I don't know if I'd like that in life.”

On a recent night, shortly after the hill closed, McCollough gathered a few tools, strapped a headlamp to his forehead, and walked toward the farthest chairlift. Strangstalien headed for a parked snowcat.

McCollough climbed a ladder at the bottom of the lift, retrieved a scraper, and used it to spread a tarry substance between each notch on the giant bull wheel that drives the lift. Liquid plastic, he called it. Nasty. Hard to get off. Gross. And all part of the daily maintenance on all three of the hill's lifts: The grease prevents the wheels from deteriorating. He greased a three-foot section of the assembly and moved the steel rope that feeds through the wheel, exposing an un-oiled section of the wheel--a job he sarcastically called one of the most glamorous maintenance tasks.

Though overnight temperatures in La Crosse can drop below zero, outdoor tasks must be completed before riders can take the lift each day.

Fifteen minutes after the chairlifts stopped running, the bright lights lining the runs went dark and the hill was blanketed in eerie black quiet. McCollough’s headlamp and the warm lights from the nearby ski lounge supplied the only light.

As if on cue, the rowdy rumbling of a diesel engine cut through the silence. The darkness is a signal to Strangstalien that the runs are free of people and safe to groom. Eight bright lights cut a path through the dark as he maneuvered his large snowcat out from behind a line of trees and around a corner.

Strangstalien drove past the chairlift and continued up the side of the closest run at a steady 4 m.p.h. The machine pitched up snow dust as a spinning tiller chopped the snow. Heavy yellow plastic sheets dragged behind the tiller, grooming the snow into a white corduroy pattern that spanned the hill from top to bottom. Inside the snowcat cab, heat blasted and country music played over the roar of the engine. The tracks underneath the cab turned roughly as they pushed the machine through the snow and crawled up the slopes.

It takes eight hours to groom every run at Mt. La Crosse. Runs are groomed every night, except for when warm temperatures or rain are in the forecast, because “the groomer will just make a big mess,” McCollough said.

Perched atop a black-diamond run—one of the steepest at Mt. La Crosse—the lights on the front of the snowcat shone forward. The steep slope of the hill below was  invisible in the dark until the tracks turned, moving the snowcat forward and pitching the cab at a near perpendicular angle to the hill. Strangstalien, held in place by waist and chest belts, drove calmly down the steep run.

Each hill groomer has their own driving pattern. Strangstalien prefers to drive up gentler slopes and down steeper ones. But McCoullough says, “It all depends on who’s doing it and what works best for them.”

Strangstalien, who isn’t a coffee drinker, relies on Mountain Dew to keep caffeinated during long nights alone on the snowcat.
“It wears on you after a little while,” he said.

Solo nights on an empty hill train the men to notice flaws in the snow created by skiers and snowboarders. As Strangstalien powered the snowcat up the hill, McCollough pointed out a hole near the chairlift, a result of skiers and snowboarders who turn at the bottom of the hill throughout the day and displace snow as they line up for the chairlift.

The work demands both patience and attention to detail.
“If you had an 'I don’t care' attitude, I don’t think you’d have any fun doing it,” McCollough said.

Although both men spend hours each night perfecting the snow, neither finds much time to strap on skis and enjoy their work. And when McCollough does get out for a few turns, he always looks at the hill as a piece of work.
“If I see something out of place I always want to go and do something about it,” he said.

The majority of the men's work is done alone, in the dark, on a closed hill, far away from the eyes of daily skiers and snowboarders. That doesn't mean it always goes unnoticed.
 
“I come in at night and people are talking about, ‘Oh the hill is so nice’ and everything, it kind of makes me feel good inside,” Strangstalien said.

There's one more element to the men's work—unrelated to snowcats and greased bull wheels and not listed in their job descriptions—that at times can be the most valuable task of all.

On that recent night at Mt. La Crosse, a maintenance worker stood at the bottom of the darkened ski hill, peering at the patterns of snow that tend to reveal lost possessions once the hill clears out for the night.

“I found a man’s wedding ring on this hill one time,” the maintenance worker said, nodding toward the steep ski run before him. “I don’t know how I did it, but I did.”