Loveland Closing

I'm a little behind on the blog, but things were kind of hectic here for the first few weeks of May. Loveland closed May eighth and the last couple weeks of work there were pretty crazy. It snowed almost every day, so we were constantly shoveling snow. I was pretty worn out after every day of work. We had accumulated 568 inches of snow by closing day, just four inches shy of the record of 572 inches. Needless to say, it was a great season for Loveland.

After Loveland closed, I was officially out of a job. I did manage to pick up some part time work there, though. Loveland is replacing chair lift 4 this summer and work on that began two days after Loveland closed. I was hired to work three ten hour days to help remove the chairs from lift 4. The first day of work went well. The weather was great and we removed chairs at about twice the rate that we were expected to. The next two days were a different story. It snowed twenty inches over the next two days. Work was miserable. We were constantly walking through deep snow and being snowed on. I come home cold, wet, and tired at the end of each day. We did manage to get all the chairs off of the haul rope and finish several other projects with the extra time we had.

The heavy snowfall did create some hassles for us, though. We were supposed to take the chairs from the lift down to the parking lot to lock them up using a Chevy 2500 HD with a gooseneck flatbed trailer. The snowcats and a large front loader had plowed a road for us but it was sketchy, to say the least. They dug through the snow down to the ground, leaving six to ten foot high walls of snow on either side of the road (that's just how deep the snowpack was. Where they piled the snow, it went up 20-30 feet). The first day, the road was fine and we managed to get one trailer load of chairs down the mountain. We left the truck up the mountain that night, ready to be loaded with chairs first thing in the morning. Because it had been so warm that day, a lot of snow melted and the water ran across the road. That night it froze on our makeshift road and snowed nine inches. The front loader scraped the snow off the road, but it was still extremely slick. Even the front loader was sliding around while working (its tires are about five feet tall). We made one attempt to take a load of chairs down the mountain but didn't make it very far. We slid backwards down the first incline we tried. Luckily, the trailer ran into a snowbank, stopping the whole rig and keeping us from jackknifing. They had to use a snowcat to push the truck and trailer up the hill. Then the whole rig slid down a banked turn and put some nice dents in the truck while the snowcat pushed it along a snowbank. We got that load down the mountain, but didn't attempt to take any more chairs down the rest of the week.

Loveland keeps recording snowfall until May 15th (I'm not sure exactly why). With that big snow storm, they broke their snowfall record handily, finishing the season with 593 inches of snow (over 49 feet). So I worked a record season.

After those three long days of tough work in the snow, I was ready for a break. But my week didn't end there.