Snowboarding

Take The Rake at Trollhaugen

An annual gathering of women coming together to build a small Midwest resort park, results in big opportunities behind the scenes for women in snowsports.

By Annie Fast

6 min readPublished on 12/13/2023 · 5:38 PM UTC

This past week, a world-class snowboard and freeski event went down at Wisconsin’s Trollhaugen ski area. Participants from around the world descended on this small Midwest resort, celebrated for its parks and incredibly welcoming vibe. But they weren’t here to drop in on the park features—these women came to build them. The annual event, dubbed Take The Rake, is focused on the operations side of parks and pipes, specifically on bringing women builders into a realm that has historically been populated by men—park builders, diggers, designers, welders, snowcat operators—all of it.

(L to R) Kelly Mooney and Sohvi Sandstrom
© Krista Holden

But first, a little about Trollhaugen. This mid-sized Midwest resort punches above its weight, drawing top pros from around the world, especially during the preseason for what Trollhaugen Marketing Director Marsha Hovey jokingly refers to as “snowboarding CrossFit”—a nonstop lapping of the rails and creative features in the rope-tow accessed parks. It’s the perfect place to work out the early-season kinks, both literally and figuratively.

Hovey created this event to bring gender equity into the male dominated resort operations area. She says, “We really created a whole new event category focused on operations and building with the focus on bringing women into jobs in the trades,” Now in its third year, Hovey says, “The demand for the event is huge.” She fields requests year-round from women wanting to be involved, she says the stories are all the same, “It’s almost like a copy and paste of ‘I’m the only woman who works at my resort. This would be a life changing experience for me.’”

Post hole digging at Take The Rake at Trollhaugen
© Krista Holden

The women converge for the weeklong event to learn from others who are trailblazers in their fields, with clinics on setting features, welding, and park maintenance. These ladies are at the controls of the snowcats and armed with rakes and shovels, reimagining and re-sculpting the main Valhalla park. This park “built entirely by women, for every human to enjoy” is then opened to the public.

Event lead Chloe Butel, an established park builder and snowcat operator now at Oregon’s Timberline Resort, stresses the importance of social connections and mentorship at Take The Rake. When she first started park building, there were no women to look up to, she says, “None. I didn’t know of any women who were doing this.” She adds, “I was always told that I was one of the only ones to do it and that’s why I was going to be successful. It wasn’t until this event that I grew my community of women.”

Park build at Take The Rake at Trollhaugen
© Krista Holden

Sohvi Sandstrom can relate, she’s a snowcat operator and park builder hailing from a small resort in Finland and now at Switzerland’s Laax Resort. Her experience is similar to Butel’s, she says, “This is my first time ever working with women—I’ve never shaped parks with women, I've never groomed with women. I’ve only known there were other women doing it from seeing them on Instagram.”

Sandstrom is among the half-dozen snowcat operators and a dozen invited diggers coming in from across North America and from as far away as Finland and New Zealand. The international participants are new this year, an intentional effort by Hovey to cast a wider net. Sandstrom is also a freeskier, which broadens the participants even further beyond snowboarders and brings unique park design insights specific to freeskiing.

Which brings us to the importance of the relationship between the users of the park and the builders. Red Bull athlete and pro rider Grace Warner joined in on Take The Rake as both a builder and a rider. Butel says, “Having Grace part of the event was really important, because all of us need to be connected to the riders—they’re the ones giving us feedback on how things are riding.”

Warner didn’t hesitate at the opportunity, “Trollhaugen is my favorite place in the world to snowboard,” she says, “Anytime I get the opportunity to come here I’m in.” While this is her first time at Take The Rake, she leaned into her experience from working on the park crew at her local Michigan resort during high school. Warner says, “It was cool to get back on a rake—I’m definitely more comfortable using a shovel than a rake these days, so it was a good experience.” She also connected with the welding workshop led by Jess Richitelli, “The welding workshop was by far the coolest part of the event for me,” she said, “I’ve always been interested in learning that side of park building.”

Richitelli is a professional welder/welding instructor with park industry experience going back two decades including running the parks at California’s Palisade Resort and Alpine Meadows. She says the shops at resorts can be an unwelcoming environment for women. “There’s a lot of ‘scary’ tools and instead of showing us how to use them it can often be like ‘Don’t touch that saw, don’t touch that welder.’ After this week though, while they’re not coming out masters at welding or every tool, they have a higher level of confidence in knowing how to use the equipment.”

Warner participated from start to finish shaping a new rail using a hand saw to cut down the S-rail and, alongside a crew, reworking the rail into an S-rail to down-flat-down. Once the crew set the new feature, dubbed the Challenge Rail, the park was opened and it was definitely Warner’s favorite. “I’ve grown to love battling that thing, that’s been my most fun feature for sure,” she says, adding, “It was cool to experience how all the girls worked together, we were all figuring things out together. This event definitely brings a different vibe to the park building experience.”

Butel shares the sentiment, she says, “It was really cool to see the collaboration—we were excited about each other’s ideas and able to make a cohesive design with everyone’s voices heard.” For Sandstrom, the experience has her going back to Laax more open-minded and more independent, “Personally, in the past it’s been hard for me to stand behind my ideas, but they make it very clear here that everyone’s opinions matter.”

“The payoff from an event like Take The Rake is immediate,” says Hovey. “Industry-wide there’s easily an additional four-to-five female cat operators because of Take The Rake and on a local scale, this year we had four women on park crew, which is the most Trollhaugen has ever had.” Looking forward, she says, “I want Take The Rake to be a catalyst for other resorts to take this event and replicate it. What we need now is more resorts to ask what they can do.”