Next Level Ops Report: A Method to the Madness
Ops Report 7/27/25: Bringing the…Boom? Bruce the Builder, Tower 1 Being Cheeky, and the Sound of Music
Opsland thrives when we are juggling 13 flaming cats while dancing a jig to music only we can hear. The music is the sound of the work that must happen: sometimes in unison, sometimes in tandem, but always in the proper progression. And as the conductor of this chaotic symphony, my favorite days are when all instruments are playing... The kind of a day when all things converge, every department humming with activity, organized chaos, a silent symphony of tasks that must get done. These are the days when you can visually see that you have moved the needle towards the common goal of opening the ski resort.
And Wednesday was my favorite kind of a day....
CAN WE BUILD IT? YES WE CAN!
Remember when we talked about building this lift in house? Yeah, we can do it. But if there was one area where I knew we would need a little guidance, it was the foundations. That's where Schultz comes in - with his years of expertise in building lifts (and his incredible patience), he is teaching us how to build the foundations. After agreeing to help, he sent me an email of all the things we would need: Pencil rod, standsees, hog heads, chair stands.... Wait, what the heck are those? Over the course of the last few weeks, he has kindly guided us through the start of the building of the foundations.
On Wednesday, Schultzy arrived early, while we were all yawning and stretching and planning the day ahead. He brought his helper, Josh, to assist us in the building of the first four foundation forms. With rebar separated and plywood stationed, our team began the work of building the first form. "Where's the skil saw? Shoot, we don't have enough framing nails. Did you get enough spools of wire tie? We are gonna need more timberlocks."
While the team worked through the fine details of putting the first form together at the shop, I got a call from Colin. Colin and his dad, Wayne, are our blasters. They had been here since the end of the week before, drilling out the towers that have ledge. And Wednesday was our first day of actual blasting. Colin called to tell me 20 minutes until the first round goes off - Rally the marketing team! So, I sped off to Admin to grab Danny and Ryan, ready with the cameras and drone. Somewhere past Green Peak, I realized that my truck wasn't gonna make it to Tower 5, so I hollered at Caleb who was doing chair migration at Green Peak with our lift maintenance team. I asked him to grab a four wheeler and follow me. Caleb ran all of us up the hill to Tower 5, where Wally was putting the finishing touches on the blast site - piles upon piles of blasting mats. Colin stationed his guys and my guys on the sides of the converging trails to thwart any potential hikers before the blast. Ryan swept the hill with the drone to look for any unwitting team members or lost hikers. Once the hill was cleared, I stood there with Wayne, waiting for the final countdown - a few blasts of a horn - before he called, "FIRE IN THE HOLE!" Andddddd..... poof? I don't know if I expected boulders to be flying or flames to come out of the ground - but seeing a tower foundation being blasted firsthand was... underwhelming to say the least - because these guys are good at their job. The blasting mats and layers of sand and soil turned the large explosion into a slight hiccup of the earth, a movement so small you would have missed it if you blinked. As we cleared the site, I chatted with Wayne - he had once stood in this same place in 1962, doing the original blasting to create the trails and lifts for Tom Corcoran, a homecoming for him of sorts. As I stood there, I wondered if Tom was watching us.... building a new t-bar and a better facility for the young alpine racers who may follow in his footsteps one day.
But you can't reminisce for very long on a day like Wednesday... Two seconds later, Ethan is at my heels asking if he can pull Ian from the blasting to help with the Green Peak power connection. He needed an extra set of hands to level out the new posts for the fan gun power. While I knew Wally could run both the 330 and the track truck, it would slow down our progress to the next tower (set to be blasted in an hour and a half) if we pulled Ian from the site. So down the mountain we went.... Looking for another set of hands to help, ones that weren't busy building forms, or doing maintenance on the lifts, or involved in the blasting, or mowing the mountain. By the time we got back down to the shop, we had our solution. Our resident electrical team was halfway up the work road and headed towards Green Peak, happy to help.
Back at the shop, the first form was halfway done! Exciting progress - all materials seemed to be working out and the guys were picking it up very quickly. Next to the Facilities Bay, where the forms were being built, Tyler was working on the NDT of the Sunnyside grips - essential maintenance work for all lifts. We proudly do this in-house as well. And next to the Lift Maintenace Bay is the vehicle maintenance shop, where our team maintains our fleet of vehicles, cats, sleds, four wheelers, heavy equipment and occasionally our small engine items such as floor cleaners, weed whackers and the like. As I walked through the shop, I noticed that Zoe was stalled on track work. She was out of Oxygen for the torches and her torch head was broken as well. A quick call to Rob D, our head electrician who was in Plymouth picking up parts, and we had another tank of Oxygen on the way from Maine Oxy, located right next to our supply house. For the torch head, I ran over to Lower Meadows where our resident welder, Rob P, was putting together yet another stick of snowmaking pipe for the run down Exhibition. Rob had extra torches and torch heads for Zoe to use and offered his own cutting torch set up if those didn't work for her. I ran the torch back to the shop, but upon inspection it needed a new seal. Tyler, who was doing NDT, took a break from sandblasting the grips to install new O-rings on the torch so Zoe could keep working on the cat tracks. At this same moment, Dylan showed up at the shop asking for help with the new bubbles for Tex. He had two more bubbles to pick up from Holderness and needed someone to ride down with him because it's a two-man job to load them on to the trailer. I asked Zoe if I could borrow Snowmaker Alan, who had been helping with cat tracks. Since she was just getting started again, she could spare him for a bit, so I sent him and Dylan on their way. Can you see the dance we must do everyday to get the work done?
But in all this running around, I had forgotten the time. 10 minutes until the next blast. So I ran back to Admin to get the marketing team, hollered at Caleb once more to give us a ride up, and barely arrived in time to see the next underwhelming and professional round of blasting by Colin and Wayne. As Wally and Ian moved all of the blasting mats up to the next tower, I took the time to run down and see Isiah who was working on the annual maintenance of our snowmobile fleet. We went through the list of snowmobiles and checked off the ones that would be retired and ordered parts for the ones that we would fix up for next season.
Then I got the call that the next blast would be delayed until the following morning - Too many mats to move, too much sand needed, it would push the blast far too late in the day. So the remainder of the day for that team would be movement up and down the t-bar line and the beginning of the drilling for the upper bullwheel and Towers 10 and 11. As it was getting to be late afternoon, I decided to stop into the accounting department to clear up any invoices that needed to be coded. I sat for a few minutes to open my laptop to get my other work done - contact Doppelmayer for parts, review the architect's design for the new adventure center, catch up on the emails I had been neglecting for hours. Relaxed and happy with such a productive day, I took a moment and reveled in the organized chaos that makes my job so enjoyable.
And then... I got the call.
And folks, when I tell you that building a lift is the highest of the highs and the lowest of the lows, believe me - I was braced for a call that would bring me back down to earth.
THIS MATH AIN’T MATHING…
"Hey, we got a problem," Bacon said. "What's up?" I replied. "Yeah, we built this form to the engineer's spec and, uh, it's 8" short. Can you come to the shop?" It's 4:05pm at this point and I hop back in my dusty, tired truck and speed towards the shop. Yup. They built Tower 1 exactly to the engineer's spec and the finished product did not come out to what was drawn on the plans. Plain English? The math didn't math. UGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
The next 15 hours were spent on the phone with the engineer, with Schultz, with Bacon, trying to figure out exactly what happened. Oh and some of that was spent trying to sleep, drifting off and dreaming of failed inspections and inaccurate tower elevations.
I can only remember one other day like this during the build of Tecumseh - the highest of the highs and the lowest of the lows on a day when we did all the things. Exactly like this Wednesday. It was when we flew the towers for Tecumseh. It was a Friday - And we had several towers left to fly - due to bad weather the days before. On this crystal-clear Friday, we landed all the towers without a hitch. And simultaneously, we installed a new transformer at the VERY tippity top of High Country for our fan guns - a treacherous mission of carrying a large transformer allllll the way to the top of the mountain and successfully connecting it to our high line. At the end of that day, with such successes, I was also happy and relaxed. Only to receive a horrible phone call a few hours later, in the dead of night. The new transformer had dropped a phase and it had caught the Schwendi Hutte transformer on fire and damaged several parts of our mountain electrical grid. UGGGGGGGHHHHHHH!
But where there is a will, there is a way. And I have never met a team with more will than the Waterville Ops team. Just as we solved the electrical issues that fateful Saturday, by 8am on Thursday we had a solution to the new T-bar towers - designed, stamped and approved by the Engineer - that wouldn't require us to tear down Tower 1 or order all new rebar or push the timeline further right. And without a hitch, the team started the forms for Tower 2, like we hadn't been panicking 15 hours before.
THE SOUND OF MUSIC
Friends, can you hear the music too? The drums and the violins and the cellos and the flutes all working through the measures of this chaotic symphony? I think many people come to the mountains for the silence - but if you listen closely, you can hear the music of your ops team working together: the music that will inevitably end in the crescendo that signifies the start of the ski season. Only 119 more days of music. WINTER IS COMING.
M
- Marissa P., Operations Manager