If you build it, they will shred

The first Saturday in February, fresh snow blanketed Sierra-at-Tahoe. The storms just wouldn't stop coming off the Pacific Ocean. But while resort guests were enjoying the best powder skiing of the year, Tyson Terpening threw on a gray jacket and headed over to a natural gully near the Nob Hill chairlift.

He wasn't concerned with fresh tracks. His entire day was in front of him in the form of mounds of snow and not much time to move it. Resort management wanted Sierra's halfpipe, which opened Feb. 4, done.

"It's just a huge thing now, and part of having a park is having a halfpipe," Terpening said. "It brings a lot of people to the mountain. You pretty much have to have a pipe now, but it takes a lot more time than people realize."

He pointed to walls of the halfpipe, mentioned the difficulty he was having with one particular corner, and then got to work, climbing into the winchcat, a machine designed to push snow around.

The winchcat costs $275,000. Another snowcat Sierra uses for its superpipe costs $250,000. Once all the snow was prepped with those two machines - several weeks worth of work - Terpening brought out the masterpiece, a $100,000 Zaugg pipecutter that sculpts 18-foot walls to perfection.

Terpening, though, just drives the machines. He can't even begin to guess what the total cost is, but the resort reports the price tag is almost $600,000. That doesn't count the hours required to build the pipe.

The resort budgets 10,500 hours of labor for its 20-person terrain park crew. It also budgets 4,000 machine-hours to maintain the superpipe throughout the season.

Terpening remembers the early days of building halfpipes at Sierra, before the $100,000 Zaugg pipecutter. When Sierra built its first pipe in 1994, it was a labor intensive process that required lots of digging and chainsaws to smooth the walls. Even John Rice, Sierra-at-Tahoe's general manager, fired up a chainsaw and worked on the pipe.

"The quality wasn't very good, but we thought the halfpipes were pretty good," said Terpening, who went to high school in Placerville and moved to Tahoe in 1993.

"The walls were probably 8-feet high, which isn't much by today's standards, but they were still pretty fun."