The LONG HAUL

It’s fairly easy to understand why restaurants aren’t usually placed on the tops of mountains, let alone mountains that are covered in nearly 100 inches of snow for much of the year. Deliveries of food and beverages have to be made, equipment has to be fixed and someone has to haul away commercial levels of waste.

For the summit lodge at Whitefish Mountain, that work is all done by one man. His name is Clay Morrison. He’s one of the many seasonal workers that operate behind the scenes to keep the amenities Flathead Valley residents enjoy clean and effective, and keep tourists coming to a mountain that pumps money into the local economy. He works at the mountain in the winter and on the marina at the Lodge at Whitefish Lake in the summer.

Four nights a week, Morrison starts up an old Sno-cat, which is the same machine that’s used for grooming, that’s been jury-rigged with a box welded on top of it to hold all the goods. It’s usually loaded when he gets to work, so after doing some prep he starts the diesel engine around 4 p.m. and lets it warm up for anywhere between 15 and 20 minutes.

Once it is ready, he starts the machine up the steep incline that leads up the trail. By this time, ski patrol has made sure the runs are clear of skiers so he can mosey his way toward the summit. Since the machine he is driving is a little bit older, he’s mostly restricted to the less steep runs up the mountain. The trip takes about half an hour round trip.

THE JOB is a solitary one, but Morrison said he likes that aspect of it. He said it serves as a nice counter to his summer work, where he spends all day helping customers at the marina we can see from our slow-moving perch. As he drives he listens to music or podcasts, and he’s seen snowshoe hares, bears and even a moose on his route before. A couple times a year he takes his son along to ride with him, and it’s special to share the experience with him.

He said the hardest point in the night can be dusk, when visibility is at its worst. Still, he loves watching the weather systems move across the valley on the slow ride up and down the mountain.

In the evening U.S. 93 looks like a steady orange line, as the headlights of people headed from Kalispell to Whitefish fuse into one in the dark and the distance. Morrison said when he used to work the graveyard shift as a groomer the highway was a red line, full of the bled-together break lights of all the commuters.

Morrison grew up in Traverse City, Michigan, a town well north of Grand Rapids on the shores of Lake Michigan on the upper end of the lower peninsula. He came to college at the University of Montana because he wanted to go West, and after hanging around Missoula for a while he came to the Flathead.

He spent his first year on the snow removal team, which travels to different points on the mountain clearing snow from anywhere the mountain might need. He spent the year scoping out which opportunities he wanted to angle for next year, and was pleased to land his job as a groomer. He enjoyed it, but three years have passed since he transitioned to this work, and he said he likes it too.

ONCE HE gets to the summit, he picks up a full dumpster with a tool on the front of the machine and backs the Sno-cat up to the garage door that serves as his loading dock. He has a couple of carts he can load things on, then wheel them over to a mechanical lift that brings it down to where they have the walk-in fridge and freezers and storage for the beer kegs.

He puts the frozen goods in one room and the fresh produce in another. He said the thing he moves the most are definitely the boxes of frozen curly fries. While the summit restaurant stocks all sorts of different foods, he said in the busy times of the year he will have to unload walls of curly fries from his truck.

During the time he is waiting for his Sno-cat to warm up, Morrison can check in with the guys who run the grooming machines in the mountain’s engine shop, just up the hill from where is delivery vehicle is parked. Morrison was a groomer on the graveyard shift himself for about nine years, and he liked it but he had a son that was getting older and the hours weren’t great for a man with a family, so when this job became available, he switched.

Still, he has a lot of respect for the men that do the work. Each of the men working the swing shift that begins at 4 p.m. had been there for over a decade, and Morrison said he thought it was amazing that at on any given night there was nearly a century of grooming experience on the slopes of Big Mountain.

Now, he starts work in the mid to late afternoon and works through the early part of the evening, except during the holiday season when the pile of curly fries that need to make it up the lodge triples and the amount of trash that has to come down triples several times over. He’s usually done by 9 p.m., but during the holidays he said he often makes repeated trips until around midnight to move everything that needs to be moved.

IT WOULD be easy for someone in Morrison’s position to complain about moving the trash. One of the most remarkable things about Morrison though is he doesn’t emit any of those feelings and he’s happy to be there doing what he is doing.

Morrison, like a lot of folks who find solace in seasonal work, isn’t sure how long he’ll be at it. The money isn’t great, but as a full-time employee at the mountain he gets season passes for himself, his wife and his son, and the schedule is great for someone who likes to ski during the day then go to work. He likes the variety of having two different jobs each year as well.

“That’s why most of us work here,” Morrison said. “It’s not for the retirement plan or the health benefits.”

Reporter Peregrine Frissell can be reached at (406) 758-4438 or pfrissell@dailyinterlake.com.