Beaver Mountain Resort
There may not be much snow on the ground now. But while Cache Valley waits for the snow to fall, workers at Beaver Mountain aren’t not sipping cocoa around a fire. There’s work to do.
“I don’t think people realize how much it takes to get a resort ready for the season,” Travis Seeholzer, Beaver Mountain worker and son of the owner, said.
Every year requires insurance, annual inspections, constant maintenance, and about five year-round workers, Seeholzer said. The lifts require extensive maintenance throughout the year because the cable stretches over time and has to be shortened, he said. They also perform non-destructive testing of the cable to ensure there are no possibly weak points or breaking points.
It cost around $300,000 to maintain the lifts this summer, he said. “It’s just all part of the game,” Ted Seeholzer, owner of Beaver Mountain, said.
The Dream Lift, one of the four large lifts at Beaver Mountain, has more than 9000 feet of cable and holds about 150 chairs, Ted Seeholzer said. Every other year the chairs have to be taken off, inspected, then moved back a couple feet to a different spot on the cable to make sure the chair doesn’t put pressure on one spot of the cable for too long.
Beaver Mountain is also one of the few ski resorts to still have volunteer ski patrol. With over 100 volunteers, multiple ski patrolmen and women patrol Beaver Mountain every day they are open for the season. Some have been volunteering at Beaver Mountain for more than 30 years.
Pete Kendrick, who has been volunteering for 30 years at Beaver Mountain, said each volunteer also puts in a day of work a couple months before the season begins to help clean the mountain.
Blake Pulsipher, this year’s head ski patrol director, said Beaver Mountain definitely has an advantage over other ski resorts.
“We have one of the nicest volunteer ski patrol stations in the nation,” Pulsipher said. “Nicer than many of the ski patrol stations at resorts that pay their ski patrol,” he added.
The ski patrol station is located at the bottom of Harry’s Dream Lift and the station was paid for and built by volunteers and alumni ski patrolmen.
Every volunteer is trained to give CPR, evacuate people from the lifts, and is given basic medical treatment training.
“We have a lot of very dedicated people,” Pulsipher said.
Until the snow arrives, Beaver Mountain staff and volunteers are preparing for the skiers to come. And if the snow doesn’t make an appearance, maybe Bear Lake will be warm enough to water ski on.