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Hi. I’m Ben Benton from Flagstaff, Arizona. I believe that you will enjoy my daily journal from Winter Park, Colorado, Ski Resort during Christmas break 1999-2000. I left downtown Flagstaff Wednesday morning, December 22 with my skis, duffle, and laptop computer, and ended up at Snoasis, a lodge midway up the mountain in Winter Park. My journal will continue through the first week of January. You’ll read about Winter Park Ski Resort, Snoasis, Sunspot Lodge, the great people who work here, and anything else I can think of to write about. I’m the author of “National Park Employment Data,” a guide to working in national parks, which is available for purchase on my web site at www.gorp.com/nped/. I’ve been working in national parks and ski areas off and on for over twenty years. Because I want the data in my book to always be fresh, I continually test the concepts, employers, and tips that I provide. I first worked at Winter Park in the late 70s while I was a student at Arizona State University. |
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Saturday, Christmas Day 1999 Unofficial Snoasis Web Site
Coming soon to a computer near you! The Unofficial Snoasis Web Site. It's under construction now and should be up in a few days with lots of photos. It's an interesting place to work because it is midway between the Winter Park base and the top of the mountain. All employees, except those that live in the building, arrive for work in heated, enclosed snowcats, the same ones that take tourists on a tour of the mountain during the day. All food and supplies arrive in refrigerated trailers pulled behind snowcats. And all the trash is taken down the mountain in large dumpsters on skids. Snoasis opened in 1968, helping to put Winter Park on the Colorado map as a leading ski resort. ***** An artist’s conception poster of Snoasis is now on the Features include: The New $350,000 Mid-Way Warming House features a unique “Scramble System” for serving food. This system, similar to the system used in supermarkets, allows a Skier to enter through turnstiles, move free to various “Islands” of food and drink items, then leave through several cashier exits.” ***** As you can see, the building wasn't named yet, and the architect claimed a unique serving system. Whether architect Robert E. Carlson actually invented the Scramble System or not, I don't know. I do know that it is in extensive use around the world to this day, and the scramble area in Snoasis has been in use for over 30 years with few changes. One change is the addition of a conveyor hamburger broiler to replace the "char-broils" which I remember using in 1978. Snoasis has a timeless design and functionality, much like Frank Lloyd Wright buildings. It originally had two fireplaces which have been bricked up because they probably didn't work well. One came up in the valley of the roof in the picture above and another on the opposite side. The building is a hexagon. Chimneys in the valley of a roof usually don't draw well; they have to be at or above the ridge line. The "1,000 per hour serving capacity" has increased due to touch screen cash registers. Since 1968, three large food complexes have been added, Mary Jane to the south, West Portal at the base, and Sunspot at the top of the Zephyer Lift, 1,000 feet above Snoasis. All told, the capacity at Winter Park is pretty impressive:
35,000 skiers per hour on 22 chair lifts in a county with a population
of 6,000. Grand County didn't even have a traffic light until
a couple years ago.  |
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