Benson sits at the bottom of the X Games superpipe, which has been his passion project over recent months. Zeppelin Zeerip photo.
Travis Benson hasn’t slept. But somehow, he doesn’t look tired.
“I worked graveyard last night on the cat,” he says with a smile on his face. “I drove from 11 last night to 9 this morning, getting the runs ready.”
But it’s not just any old ski run he was grooming for this morning, it’s the X Games course: Benson is the snowmaking manager at Buttermilk Mountain, a job he has held for close to 30 years after abandoning a promising career in finance for a life shaping snow.
“The coolest part about working on the X Games is coming down the mountain in the cat at 1 AM, and the lights are on and the mountain is empty. And even though there’s no one around, the energy is still there. Driving down from the top of the mountain in the middle of the night reminds me why we do this.”
“This” translates directly to “create the X Games.” We see the gravity-defying hang time, mind-bending backflips, and the glory of winning gold medals for the athletes during the four days of competition, but without the crew of 18 snowmakers and cat drivers at Buttermilk Mountain, there would be no X Games, no tricks or turns, and no medals.
Constructing a superpipe is no small task when there are historically low amounts of natural snow on the ground. Phil Ellsworth / ESPN Images photo.
Creating the snow that constructs the pipes, jumps, and slopes is a job that requires ensuring the success of all things X Games—from giving the Snow Park Technologies team enough snow to refine and tweak the course designs to nightly grooming for the public runs so Buttermilk mountain can continue to serve its purpose as a resort for the thousands of fans and locals swarming the ski hill off Highway 82, just outside Aspen, Colorado. Benson and his team bring the X Games to life with a healthy dose of that powdery cold stuff—but on a year like this (read: dry), that creation feels more like a resuscitation.
Benson and his team had to start from scratch this year. At the beginning of construction back in November, Buttermilk Mountain had a base of seven inches. Not much better than the natural pack it had on opening night of the Games—just a measly 18” base. Across the state of Colorado, mountain snowpack has decreased 20 to 60 percent at most monitoring sites since the 1950s, according to an EPA analysis.
“The whole state is having its worst opening in 20 years,” Auden Schendler, vice president of sustainability for Aspen Snowmass, told the Coloradoan. “This is the weather and climate we fear. It’s already here.”
So when Mother Nature can’t deliver, Travis Benson and his team does. Buttermilk Mountain boasts five Techno Alpine fan guns and a handful of manually operated ground guns that are responsible for creating winter when winter doesn’t come. It’s a recipe that calls for six ingredients: water, air, cold temperatures, guns, and a few folks who aren’t afraid.
“When you make snow, you’re combining four variables that are pretty dangerous,” Benson says. “It’s high-pressure air, high-pressure water, high electric voltage, and freezing temperatures—all done in the dark.”
Just to run the numbers, the fan guns are plugged into 480-volt plugs and run a turbine and a compressor—all while feeding water through the lines. Each fan gun has a heater inside it as to keep the engines and water lines from freezing up. To create perfect snow, each flake must be formed around a sort of nucleus, so that the density of the snow isn’t heavy and keeps the powder airy. To create that kind of detail in the snow, each gun operates a nucleator—which must stay nice and warm to create air pockets that act as nuclei in the snowflakes. That air needs to stay cold so the flakes keep their form until it’s time for them to expand as the air naturally warms.
Benson may never sit atop a medal podium, but if not for him, skiers like Gus Kenworthy (above) would never be able to showcase their talents at X Games. Matt Morning / ESPN Images photo.
“You’re trying to make a snow that’s dry enough that it doesn’t pack into ice when you push it,” explains Benson. “Basically, you have to find the sweet spot where you could make a snowball out of the snow, but you can’t wring any water out of it.”
It’s man-made elements at odds inside a machine. The handheld air-water guns typically require access to compressed air that the Buttermilk crews runs through underground pipelines at 125 pounds a second—and then funnel underground waterlines running at 500 PSI per second. That’s a lot of power for one person to hang on to with their hands.
“It’s a very challenging job that takes a special breed to get it done,” Benson says. “You’ve got to be a hard worker, be independently motivated, and have a very high level of pride in what you do because at the end of it all, the product you create has to be perfect.”
“Everyone here is so team oriented and they aren’t afraid to call each other out if someone makes a mistake. But they always have each other’s backs,” Benson says. “That’s a big part of it. The biggest testament of this crew is that they just made it through an entire snowmaking season without any injuries. A big part of that is looking out for each other.”
But there were still challenges. The crew had a few night shifts along the way this year, thanks to the wonky anti-winter Colorado has been hit with.
“It’s not that we aren’t getting the temperatures that we need, it’s that we aren’t getting them consistently,” Benson explains. “There’s a lot of start-up, shut-down—and that’s hard on the crew. It takes a lot of work. It’s not just flipping a switch. It’s a lot of guys going out there trying to reenergize the whole thing and then you’re shutting it all down. Getting enough snow for X Games while still getting enough snow for the public trails and trying to balance that at the right times was hard. But it seemed to have worked out, actually.”
You would never know, standing there overlooking the base of Buttermilk, the superpipe, and the jumps that this season was Buttermilk’s driest to date since the X Games claimed Aspen as its home in 2002.
“When you have a year like this, executing construction is pretty intense,” Benson says. “There’s no second chance with this. Fortunately, we had a lot of returners on the crew this year and they’ve been doing this process for a long time.”
Benson abandoned a day trading career with a comfortable paycheck for a life of long nights driving snowcats–and he's never looked back. Matt Morning / ESPN Images photo.
What he doesn’t mention is that he’s one of those veterans. Benson—an Aspen native—has been working on Buttermilk Mountain for nearly three decades.
“I got into this by accident,” he confesses. “I always intrigued with snowcats, and one day I was working in the office and just thought to myself, ‘Maybe I should just go drive a snowcat part-time.’”
So he did. But not part-time.
Benson gave up not only his desk, but an entire company. At age 27, he sold the trading company that he owned and started driving cats. Benson is a man who sold it all for a love of the snow.
“That trading company was a partnership between my father and I, but I wasn’t meant to be a businessman my whole life,” he says. “I was bound to a business that wasn’t making me happy. To get personal about it and be honest, I got married and the busiest week I had to date with the business also happened to be the same week I was on my honeymoon. That was kind of a signal of, ‘It’s time to back away.’”
And Benson never felt like he was giving up a family business.
“This feels more like a family here on this mountain than any office ever did,” he says. “You can live your life to make money or you can live your life for the quality of it and be happy. This is more of a quality of life here than I could’ve had anywhere else. I’ve been able to spend time on this mountain that I would’ve spent sitting behind a computer.”
Benson, who learned to ski on Buttermilk, raised his own sons on the mountain and taught them to ski the same runs where he fell in love with the Aspen Valley.
“It’s been so cool growing up here and learning to ski on this mountain,” he says. “My boys learned to ski here. This mountain is a second home to me. I know where every undulation is, I know where the raspberry bushes will bloom every spring and where the strawberry beds are in the fall. It’s like a backyard to me.”
And now that the X Games is officially over, it’s time for Benson to go spend some time in his backyard. He hasn’t slept more than four hours a night since Thanksgiving, but that graveyard-shift smile is stuck on his face because he doesn’t want to sleep: He wants to get on the mountain.
“I’m going skiing right now,” he laughs.
