HOTHAM'S snow grooming manager Jesse Ruming grew up on the mid north coast of NSW and trained as a carpenter before heading to Canada to operate a machine at a skating rink at Big White Ski Resort.
“It was always my dream to get a job as a groomer back in Australia and I was lucky to be offered an opportunity,” said Jesse.
"I’ve been here for 10 seasons now; it’s just home.
"I don’t think anywhere compares with the views over the Victorian High Country from Hotham.”
In a way, a career as a groomer was always predestined, given Jesse’s love of machines.
“I never wanted to be a fireman or a superhero growing up, I just wanted to work with machines,” he said.
His day starts around 2.30pm when he’ll meet with mountain operations managers, including ski patrol, lift operations, snowmaking and terrain teams.
“They tell me what has happened in the day and we talk about what needs work,” said Jesse.
“You can never plan too much because everything changes – the weather, the conditions, you’re always racing against the clock to get things finished overnight.”
For the past few weeks, Jesse has been running a new grooming machine, a Prinoth Bison X, which he calls “the Swiss army knife of snow cats”.
“It has completely different controls than our other machines and feels a bit like a spaceship,” he said.
“There’s a lot of learning, but it’s a really nice experience – everything about it is good!”
The new machine is both a winch cat and a park cat, two machines that usually have separate capabilities.
The winch cat is used in steeper conditions to anchor the cat at the top of the hill while it moves down the winch cable and back up again, while the park cat is used to make terrain park features.
Jesse said that when the sun comes up and the lifts start spinning, the groomers must be gone so there’s always a hard deadline.
The job of the grooming team has a lot to do with gravity.
When skiers and boarders come down a hill, the snow builds up in bumps and is pushed downhill all day.
“We essentially push it back up the hill,” said Jesse.
He said the most challenging part of being a groomer at Hotham is the advanced terrain, as well as the weather and how it will always change everything.
“It changes the snow quality and the humidity really affects conditions and whether it’s dry or wet,” he said Jesse.
“We’re always battling the weather.”
Jesse says he wishes people knew a bit more about how much work goes into a ski run to get it prepared each night.
“In good conditions, a ski run can take an hour to groom, but other times it might take six hours to groom one ski run where it took an hour the night before,” said Jesse who manages a team of six to seven groomers each night.
“There’s a lot of work that goes into it!”
Find out more about Hotham’s Mountain Operations Team on YouTube.
