Jeff Clancy loves the off-season. 
“You can go into a bar on a Saturday night in April and see maybe five or six people and know them all.  I live right in the village; in the winter I can come in here after a 14-hour shift and sit at the bar with my girlfriend.  Parking can be real tough though, when there’s skiers here.  But I guess that’s the tradeoff, I mean, they wouldn’t need no snowmakers if they didn’t have so many people coming into town.”

It’s not just Clancy who loves snowmaking enough to deal with hoards of city-slicker tourist types.  25 out of his 33 crewmembers are returnees from the 2006-2007 season.  Over 50% of Holiday Valley snowmakers have at least three years of experience, which, according to Steve Crowley, Director of Mountain Operations, is the highest seasonal employee retention rate in the country.  Snowmakers come back for a variety of reasons.  Clancy says a lot of guys who work construction over the summer could actually get a comparable sum through unemployment, but they choose to make snow because, as he puts it, “they just can’t stand sitting around, plus, it’s a very physical job, running all over the mountain.  It’s like getting paid to go to the gym.”  A gym where you get sprayed with water in sub-zero temperatures with 20 mile per hour winds and have to zoom around a mountain for eight hours straight.