Interview With The Man Who Skied 7+ Million Vertical Feet This Winter

I wasn't sure what to expect.

Spurred by a press release from Snowbasin Resort, Utah, I’d arranged to talk on the phone with Tom Hart, who's set to officially break the Guinness World Record for most vertical feet skied in a season later this year (he's already unofficially broken the record).

A soft voice buzzed through my phone: “Good afternoon, this is Tom Hart.”

When we spoke on Monday, Hart surprisingly hadn’t gone skiing, as his ski area of choice, Snowbasin Resort—where he's notched "99.9%" of his vertical feet—had just closed for the season.

He quickly informed me that he had spent 150 of the past 152 days skiing and he plans to continue stacking vertical at Utah ski resorts that remain open, like Snowbird.

Hart grew up just outside of St. Paul, Minnesota, where he learned to ski on the 300-foot tall slopes of Wild Mountain. He’s come a long, long way from his humble home hill. This season, Hart has skied “the equivalent of more than 23,000 runs at Wild Mountain” so far.

He fell in love with Utah via a post-college Snowbird timeshare purchase. “Everybody told me I was crazy to buy a timeshare unit,” he said. “And it was the best decision I ever made in my life.”

Hart eventually moved to Ogden, Utah, where he found a job in commercial real estate and began skiing at Snowbasin Resort.

Now retired, Hart started exploring the idea of the world record before this winter. “I crunched the numbers, and I shared them with my friends. I said 'I really think I can do this.'”

During the 2014-2015 season, a Canadian named Pierre Marc Jette skied 6,025,751 vertical feet, setting the already-impressive official Guinness World Record Hart had to surpass.

Hart was undeterred, though, and applied to the Guinness World Records on November 2nd.

To meet Guinness' certification requirements, Hart gathered “a tremendous amount of documentation,” including news accounts, maps, data from apps that track vertical feet, and witness statements.

Hart likely had no trouble finding witnesses. He’s a member of an informal Snowbasin group called the First-in-Liners, who gather at the base of the resort at 7:30 a.m. to socialize and ski together. "We get in line and you know kind of share each other's company. Talk about things," he said.

The group, which covers a wide demographic of ages and occupations, is like a “Rotary Club,” according to Hart. He noted that many of the members are retirees.

Among the First-in-Liners, Hart is known as “Racer Tom” because he often sports a pair of race skis. The nickname arose out of neccesity because several other First-in-Liners are named Tom. “There is Tall Tom, there was Alaska Tom,” said Hart. "I’m Racer Tom.”

Hart’s local fame and nickname goes beyond the First-in-Liners, though. Snowbasin’s press release said that its employees—whom Hart frequently spoke fondly of—cheered him on as he pursued the world record.

Hart was a bell-to-bell skier this season, usually enjoying a lunch of three half-sandwiches on the lift. His toppings? “Peanut butter and jelly” or “peanut butter and honey.”

Sometimes, he'd stop in Snowbasin's lodges. "Several of my friends will say, hey, I'll buy lunch and have it ready for you," he said. "And then text me where they're sitting, and I would just walk in, sit down, have, you know, maybe take five minutes to eat, and then I would be on my way."

Hart mostly lapped the DeMoisy Express and the Middle Bowl Express to pump those vertical feet numbers up. "The Strawberry part of the mountain is where you can really get the most vertical because the runs are very wide open," he said.

While Hart's ski season isn't over yet, he unofficially surpassed the world record on April 8th amidst the solar eclipse. This past weekend, he hit 7.1 million feet during Snowbasin's last hurrah.

He said exceeding the Guinness World Record was “a wonderful accomplishment,” but it’s only the “icing on the cake… the cake being the joy of skiing bell-to-bell every day with all my friends.”

(Based on Snowbird, Utah's vertical feet leaderboard, Hart isn't the only skier to have unofficially passed Jette's 2014-2015 record this season. A Snowbird skier named Steffi E. has skied 8.5 million feet according to the app, although it's unclear if they have or intend to make an officially documented world record bid like Hart via Guinness.)

This winter, Hart's old friend came to visit him in Ogden. When the friend left, he gave Hart a note. “It was just great to see the joy that you, you know, that you and your friends and the Snowbasin staff share,” Hart said, explaining the note's gist.

“He hardly said anything about how many vertical feet I skied this year.”

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