Snow Patrol
Photos by Bob Winsett
Copper Mountain's team of Ski Patrol is making a difference in so many lives.
Copper Mountain Resort's Ski Patrol Ensure's A Safe And Enjoyable Mountain Experience
Tucker, a handsome yellow lab with expressive brown eyes, lives the kind of carefree lifestyle most people dream of. He wakes early in the morning, eats his dog chow, hops on a ski lift and side-by-side with his owner, ski patrolman Paul Molnar, rides to the top of Copper Mountain.
There, in one of the resort’s three duty stations, Tucker spends the day playing fetch, lounging about, meeting skiers and snowboarders, and once a week performing drills to locate missing persons in a simulated avalanche field.
As it turns out, Tucker is excellent at his job.
The ski patrolmen love him. In Molnar’s words, “He’s fun, rowdy, and likes to have a good time.
Missing persons love him, too.
Tucker is the senior dog on the patrol team, a seasoned hand at finding his buried targets.
He has never been called into action at the resort, but once in March 2005 he and Molnar hitched a ride on a helicopter to the Monte Cristo Couloir on Quandary Peak, where a pair of hikers had unwittingly set off an avalanche.
Tucker helped with the search for several hours while the weather got so bad all air support had to be called off. One of the two hikers survived.
With courageous moments like that in his pedigree, it’s easy to understand why Tucker gets a lot of attention, but Molnar and the rest of the patrollers who train Tucker are a less obvious PR opportunity.
Ski patrollers are, by their very job description, the men and women behind the mountain’s fluffy surface.
They monitor the resort’s snow, regulate its ropes, post its signage and, when a crisis arises, use their medical expertise to mitigate that crisis’s severity.
There are five ski resorts in Summit; each has a team of patrollers who work to fulfill these needs.
Copper Mountain Ski Patrol is one of the larger patrol teams in the county.
The staff consists of 60 fulltime patrollers, 100 volunteers who work as Slope Watch (the folks who tell you to slow down on groomers and other high-traffic runs), 20 medical volunteer professionals (doctors and nurses who donate their time on the mountain to increase Copper’s medical response force), and 15 high school students who assist in most patrol operations.
The avalanche dogs Tucker, Tracker, Eddy, Cascade, and Bridger round out the team.
September through early November is a sporadic time of year for the patrol team, as the amount of early season snowfall dictates what their daily job entails.
Priority one for the resort is getting all the snow packed down so it’s safe for early season skiing. Ski Patrol isn’t responsible for running snowcats over the terrain — that job falls on Slope Maintenance’s shoulders — but they are the ones who boot pack all the avalanche terrain that isn’t snowcat accessible.
Boot packing means heading to the top of zones that look to be unstable and walking down the fall lines step-by-step, ideally breaking all the way down to dry earth.
“Our goal every year is getting 80 to 90 percent of the avalanche terrain on the mountain packed by foot,” says Toby Cruse, a ski patrol foreman and snow safety coordinator at Copper.
“We find that it really saves the snow. If we wait too long and a hard slab develops, we never get the same sort of snow base.”
The patrolmen are the first to get their feet in the snow; they’re also the first to ski it.
Often they step down the runs perpendicularly on their skis, then work tight turns through the fall lines and broader zigzags across the terrain. If the snow still seems unstable, patrollers do explosive testing with charges to flush the pack.
They also dig data pits where they test for density, crystal structure, and sheer planes within various slab formations. As Hagen Lyle, manager of Copper Ski Patrol, explains, “We’ve got to touch all the snow that’s out there and make sure we feel good about it.”
Once they do, their jobs become more routine. Copper ski patrollers typically get on the mountain each morning at 8, whereupon they perform standard trail checks, cordon off unseen obstacles like rocks and fallen trees, and put out rope and signage on runs that were groomed the night before.
If there was snow in the night, they often hit the mountain at 6 and do snow safety work with explosives before the resort opens.
In the middle of the day the patrollers are on-call for medical responses. And come 4:30 in the afternoon, they’re back sweeping the mountain, this time bringing down ropes and banners on runs scheduled to be groomed and systematically checking each trail to ensure no one is left stranded in the cold.
“You learn something new every day and every year,” says Nick Pollard, a nine-year veteran of the team. “No two winters are the same. Each year I come back because of the team’s camaraderie, and because the learning curve is still there.”
Most patrollers on the team are, like Pollard, in their twenties or thirties, many of them college grads looking for a break before they head on to medical school or a desk job. The job at Copper requires a two-year commitment.
Most stick around longer. In that sense, Pollard is the prototypical patroller. He grew up in Quincy, Illinois, right on the banks of the Mississippi. He confesses that a few times as a kid he tried to swim the Big River. “It’s not the smartest thing I’ve ever done,” he confesses.
In 1995 Pollard moved to Estes Park, Colorado, for an outdoors camp, then continued on to Vail, where he worked a season as a lift operator. A few of his buddies were in Summit, so the next year he headed to Frisco, working as a concierge at Keystone for a spell, then a beverage manager at Copper. His fourth year he fell into ski patrolling and hasn’t looked back since.
“This is a great team,” Pollard exclaims. “We all hang out. We’re all good friends. We leave at the end of the season; when we come back, it’s like we never left. And when things get serious, everyone comes together really well.
Especially if we’re on the scene of an intense medical situation, it’s amazing how well the machine runs. Everyone knows their roll. Everyone plays their part. We get the job done.”
Copper Mountain sees more than a million visitors take a stab at its terrain each year; less than one percent of those get injured.
But when they do, it’s ski patrol’s responsibility to get the injured riders located, stabilized, and down the mountain to a medical care facility as promptly as possible.
Most injuries on the mountain are isolated orthopedic ones — wounded knees and shoulders. In general it’s the skiers who hurt their knees, the snowboarders who hurt their shoulders.
When a call comes in, the dispatcher assesses the situation and sends out an appropriate number of patrollers to the scene, generally with a toboggan in tow.
When the patrollers arrive, they inform the dispatcher of their exact whereabouts, then switch to a private radio to keep the injured party’s name and personal information confidential. 
All patrollers are certified emergency medical technicians (EMTs). In most cases, they’re well adept to assess an injury on the spot, get the injured party safely on the toboggan and ski them down the mountain to the medical clinic in Copper’s Center Village.
In some cases, however, due to the severity of an injury, the ski patrol needs to summon Flight for Life, the Denver-based non-profit that flies helicopters from slopeside to Denver for emergency care www.flightforlifecolorado.org
Copper patrollers pride themselves on being able to transport injured riders from the mountain to the emergency room before the snow melts on their blankets.
“It’s really something to be able to say that I have saved somebody’s life,” notes Cruse, the patrol foreman. “It’s very specialized, what we do.
A doctor can’t get off a lift and save someone. Of course, I can’t operate on someone in surgery, but I can sure get them there alive. And that’s what ski patrol is all about.”
In his 25 years of being involved with ski patrol, Cruse and his fellow patrollers have received countless gifts from visitors who were involved in serious accidents.
“When they’re that hurt, they always remember,” Cruse says. “They send us a Christmas card or some cookies or what have you. It’s pretty gratifying.”
Cruse began as a ski patroller in 1982 at Keystone, then moved on to A-Basin and finally Copper Mountain in 2000. He comments that from one team to the next the same tenet holds true: You work hard and never settle for less than an absolutely safe environment on the mountain.
“Of course,” Cruse adds, “the advantage of being a ski patroller is that, when the work is done, you look around the room for your best buddy and go for a ski.”
www.coppercolorado.com
Andrew Tolve is a former Frisco-based writer now living in California.
