Killington’s Spartan office was a concrete block structure above the maintenance area. I had a tiny office adjacent to the lower maintenance area. Preston Smith’s cousin, Barry Leete, was assigned to me, and he shared my small office with no other place to put him. At his request, I gave him the task of redesigning the controls for the chair lifts. The existing controls could not keep the lifts running at lower speeds and were prone to periodic failures. Leete designed and ordered direct current Cutler/Hammer controls. He also designed the intercom system for the replacement Snowshed base lodge.
Killington had never been able to run more than five or six snowmaking guns without at least one of the system’s pipes bursting. I spent much of my first winter analyzing the system to see why it didn’t work. The company that had sold the system to Killington was in the agricultural watering business and supplied quick-connect exposed aluminum piping. A quick analysis revealed that the piping was not suited for cold weather applications, and that was one of the primary problems.
Snow guns use a mixture of compressed air and water, so I did an energy balance analysis on the system. If the compressed air pressure were greater than the water pressure, the water would stop flowing and freeze, causing a pipe to burst, sending freezing water spewing over the ski slope. This energy imbalance led to pipes bursting every time we turned on the system.
I hoped to have 50 guns in position on Snowshed and to operate not five or six but 25 at a time – which would cover half of the slope. The trick was to get as much water through the gun with as little compressed air as possible, as compressed air is expensive. With borrowed water meters from the Rutland Department of Public Works, we were able to measure how much water our test guns were using. We built a host of designs until we settled on a gun that maximized water use and minimized compressed air. The previous supplier was charging over $200 per gun. Ray Tarleton and I built our redesigned and improved guns for $25.00 each. For the sake of efficiency and durability, I determined we should position our new guns closer to the pipeline, necessitating the purchase of a John Deere 350 bulldozer to push accumulated piles of snow across the slope. The dozer would be specially equipped with wide tracks and a wide blade, very much like the snow cats you see today. By December 1965, I was ready to present the redesign to Smith: all new pipes, guns, hoses, and a specially outfitted John Deere bulldozer—a complete rebuild. With over $200,000 already invested in the snowmaking system, Smith was incredulous.“You want us to junk it?” Smith said.
I explained my calculations, and after some back-and-forth, Smith finally agreed. We started removing the aluminum pipes, some of which I managed to sell to Suicide Six in Woodstock, which was still trying to use its original aluminum pipe system.
The compressor house was a scary place. It was located halfway up the Snowshed slope and about the size of a two-car garage. Inside, Killington had stuffed two huge air compressors purchased from a mine in Pennsylvania. Ray Tarleton was the only person who could get the compressors to work. Tarleton propped up the electric panel disconnect arm with a 2×4 to keep the compressors running. When the compressors were turned on, the lights on the access road would dim. One night, a pipe connection came loose, and the entire side of the compressor house was blown off. It sounded like a jet plane as the compressed air gushed out. In order to have enough air to run 25 guns simultaneously, we rented six construction diesel-powered compressors. Running them for 24 hours straight would require a daily fuel truck delivery—literally a pressure situation.
Tarleton would clock out every night exactly when the lifts stopped, on the dot. One night, on my way out, I noticed his car was still in the parking lot an hour after closing. By the time I got home, it started to bother me. I came up with an excuse to call Tarleton’s house. His wife was upset, saying she knew I was calling because something had gone wrong. I returned to our maintenance building, hopped in a snowcat, and drove across the access road to the top of Snowshed. I started working my way toward the compressor house, looking for Tarleton. It was a bitterly cold night. As I descended the lift line, I saw a flicker of light falling to the snow. There it was again. It turned out that Tarleton, dressed in just a flannel button-down shirt, was stranded in one of the chairs, part way down the slope. He’d decided to hop on an empty chair to ride to the bottom without telling the lift operators. The lift operators were in the midst of shutting the lift down for the day and did not know that Tarleton had boarded a downhill chair in the middle of the run-out process. Tarleton was igniting pieces of the Styrofoam seat cover as he saw my snowcat coming into view.
I yelled to him, “Whatcha doin’ up there, Ray?”
“Do I look like a hoot owl?” he yelled back. “Get me down!”
Fast forward to November, 1966. The new system was built, and we were waiting for the temperature to get cold enough to turn it on and see if it did what it was supposed to. I issued strict instructions to fire it up the first time the temperature fell below freezing. Watching the thermometer, I hurried to work on that first cold day, but there wasn’t a soul in sight when I entered the maintenance building. The snowmaker had not been turned on. Where was everybody? Answer: It’s the first day of deer hunting season. Another lesson learned for yours truly, engineer Jim, on the workings of our all-Vermont crew.
We turned the system on the next day, putting the design and my credibility to the test. With all the expenditure and effort we’d put into the new system, my head was now on the chopping block. We went “all in” and turned on all 25 snow guns. The question on everyone’s mind was: Would the new system last longer than the old one? How long would she last before breaking down?
After three days of solid operation, we had to shut the snowmakers off because we had buried ourselves in snow! The John Deere worked like a charm, pushing the snow across the entire Snowshed slope. I had fulfilled my initial “marching orders” to make the snowmaker work. I knew it was a big success when I saw how many Killington employees rushed to take credit for it. Preston Smith would spend the rest of his career expressing how proud he was to be able to position Killington as a leader in the world of snowmaking.
Slippery Slopes is an ongoing series written by James Kachadorian about the early days of Killington. Look for future installments each week in the Mountain Times.
