Mt. Hood Meadows Director of Slope Maintenance Sam Cordell was honored with the NSAA Tower of Excellence Award at the PNSAA spring conference last week. The Tower of Excellence award recognizes and honors a ski resort employee, past or present, who has made significant contributions to the “outside operations” of their resort.
According to the nomination, “Sam not only has one of the strongest work ethics in the industry but has continually pushed the envelope for slope maintenance and snow farming. This season has been very difficult but frankly would not have happened was it not for Sam’s foresight, innovative ideas and leadership with the slope grooming departments. He developed and helped build our own snowcat trailer with dump bed, loader buckets for snow cats, snowblower attachments for snowcats and summer stump grinding and brush cutting grooming program but he also rents and uses multiple Maruka tracked dump trucks during the season. In addition the daily planning and resource used to implement all these tools takes great leadership and foresight to bring it all together. Due to all of Sam’s efforts we hope to operate over 118 days during a season with only approximately 125 inches of natural snowfall, the lowest amount in our recent history. Additionally when the freezing level rose high above the Nordic center area he found an area further up the hill to provide a product for the Nordic community which allowed high school athletes the opportunity to continue training and compete in a season where most people would have just thrown in the towel. The grooming quality not only enabled us to stay open but was recognized by our guests as actually some of the highest quality grooming we have ever had thanks to Sam and his team.”
Congratulations on your well deserved award Sam. And thank you and your crew for giving us the best this season had to offer!
Video of this season's Snow Harvesting