Backcountry Beacon

“What?”

Moment Skis founder Casey Hakansson can’t hear me, and it’s not because the machinery in the bustling Moment factory is too loud. It’s because of Led Zeppelin.

I’m sitting across from Casey in a booth at the Imperial Lounge in downtown Reno, peering over a Sierra range of empty glasses and bottles between us while I attempt to gain insight into one of the hottest young ski companies in the industry. Hakansson, Moment VP/Engineer Luke Jacobsen, and the others we’ve met so far have made a point of welcoming us to this mini-Vegas just east of Tahoe. As if to prove my point, a bobbly redhead sits to his right, gushing on about whales. Her favorite is the narwhal, “’cause it looks like a unicorn, duh!” She and her chatty, miniskirted, MySpace-blonde friend sat down uninvited to our table so readily, we thought at first they were servers. She insists she’s a paralegal. We think they might be prostitutes.

Born and raised in Nevada, Hakansson sold his first pair of skis in 2004, with all-black topsheets and no name to speak of. Two years ago he received an order from Australia, and “that’s when we knew the word was getting out.” Moment may have just graduated from locals-only status, but they’ve been blowing up from the Rockies to the Alps since with their progressive shapes, distinctive designs and reputation for bomber construction. Nearly every ski in the Moment line, from the Moment Reno Rocker to the Donner Party, flaunts some form of rocker, reverse camber, or funky sidecut, and it’s easy to tell from the instant you spot the signature square tips that you’re looking at something unique.

Along with our fifth (sixth?) round of Miller High Life bottles at the Imperial, more Moment employees appear in a puff of sawdust and powdered P-Tex, ready to get after it. We drove nine hours to get here, it’s only 9:15, and I’m already having trouble forming complete sentences.

Reno, baby. Reno.

“It’s not always like that,” confides Luke the next evening, after an epic downhill run of berms and drops off the Mt. Rose Highway, “and everyone here really is that friendly.”

“You mean, like this?” I counter, because I’m already sipping my second drink, made by the same bartender, in the same bar, and possibly in the same glass. But I’m halfway joking, because I have to believe him. These guys play the nonchalant party animal role a little too gleefully for serious boozehounds, and if they went after it every night, there’s no way Moment Skis would be as good as they are. Hell, it’d be a miracle if any of them saw 40.

The fact is, they tipped their hand before we even arrived. When we left Park City the previous day, they were in the factory … and they were still there, working hard, nine hours later when we pulled in. And this morning, while the three Utahns slept off their hangovers, the Moment guys were laying up Bibby Pro Models and Night Trains, firing the presses and monitoring the CNC machine. That’s Saturday morning, for the record, and they’ll be here tomorrow as well.

Making skis is hard work; making skis by hand is even harder. “It’s pretty hectic,” confesses Jacobsen. “We’re sold out, and right now every ski that comes off the line is slated for shipping.”

“We’re in here seven days a week, and most nights,” he yells over his shoulder as he shows us around the two-room factory, situated between a body shop and a Mexican grocery on the sketchy outskirts of Reno.

While a few now fall under computer control, the majority of the production processes at Moment still involve some sort of hands-on expertise, and by next season almost every ingredient apart from the Austrian steel edges will source from right here in los Estados Unidos. “Honestly,” admits Casey, “we haven’t had time to focus on ‘going green’ at this stage, but thanks to U.S. manufacturing standards we’re already far more stringent than they are overseas.

“And since we’re dependent on snow for a living, we always keep an eye on environmental impact.”

Steps like providing base guides to their Ohio supplier—so the scraps can be recycled—and turning core trimmings into horse bedding for local ranchers might seem minor, Hakansson admits, “But it definitely adds up after a season.” And since Moment ships from Reno, rather than China, their small carbon footprint gives them a big leg up on the competition.

Moment takes special pride in their cores; unlike big-name companies who use finger-joined scrap wood to save money, Moment selects solid pine, aspen, and ash planks to ensure longevity and uniform flex characteristics. In one room, blond stacks of wood crowd floor-to-ceiling shelves like a Bauhaus architect’s wet dream, evidence that they make the cores in-house.

Opposite the shelves sit a rip saw and the CNC machine, screaming like a chorus of old dot-matrix printers as it routs twin hourglass shapes from thin, multi-ply core sheets. A surface planer waits patiently in one corner, ready to shape flat core sheets into gentle tip-to-tail waves. Mitch Dufour sits in the middle of the room presiding over glued and clamped core blocks like a giant wood gnome, covered in sawdust and grinning as I shake hands and introduce myself. The CNC machine is loud; he points at his ears in the universal sign language for “Can’t hear you, man.”

In the next room, machinery and work tables elbow for space with rolling racks of skis in various stages of completion. Batches move from the layup table to the presses, then on to trimming and finishing. They resemble oversize sheets of pastry dough, curling up at their translucent ends to reveal the square tips that are Moment’s calling card.

The pastry metaphor isn’t far from the truth; in essence, this is a high-tech bakery. Each cassette is like a springform cake mold over a DuraSurf 4001 base. Layers of VDS damping foil and pre-preg fiberglass sheets of various thicknesses and weaves surround the core, with environmentally friendly basalt fabric on top for pop retention. The topsheet frosting features graphics by local artists, embedded into the plastic using a top-secret sublimation process. Moment’s proprietary non-metal mounting sheet adds nuke-proof insurance against binding-screw rip-out, a countermeasure installed after countless test runs and “Grunt flips” (an in-house nickname for gut-crunching inverted airs).

In the press, heat blankets bring the sandwich up to a toasty 185 degrees Fahrenheit, liquefying the resin between each layer. When everything’s nice and pliable, inflatable bladders whump the skis into preset camber profiles. Aluminum spreaders help keep everything flat; no mean task when the Comi—Moment’s widest model—clocks a massive 160mm at the tips. An hour or so later, the skis come out and head to finishing.

“What you have now is basically a pair of skis hiding inside a resin and fiberglass envelope” says Luke, watching as Ben Eide-Hughes grabs a pair and turns to the band saw. “First we trim, then we use a vertical grinder to angle the sidewalls.”

After the skis are cut and edged, they pass over a belt grinder to remove excess P-Tex, and then a wet stone grind provides a perfectly flat base with wax-holding structure.

“We inspect each ski for flaws, then send them up front for polishing with a soft stone. Those stray fiberglass strands will do a number on your hands,” quips Luke, holding up a palm that, in my opinion, doesn’t look particularly ravaged. “But that’s why we have interns now,” he concludes with a smile.

All told, Moment Skis can produce about twenty pairs in a 24-hour period. At that rate, and with orders pouring in every day, they’re going to need to find a bigger place, fast. “Growth is good,” says Hakansson, looking around the cramped front office that now hosts a new shrink-wrapper, piles of softgoods, and a few out-of-date computers, “We’ll be moving to a new facility in February and that’ll be great … more grinders and a second CNC machine … but we’re never going to be K2, and we don’t want to be.”

“Moment’s always made skis with a lot of love, and we’re committed to doing things by hand. That’s not going to stop. There’ll just be more people doing the loving.”

There’s more to tell: stories of heart-stopping burgers and three-AM casino breakfasts, mechanical bull rides, tri-tip burritos, mullets, and midnight karaoke. There are the trails we rode and the deep Tahoe snowpack we promised to exploit on our next visit. And the longer we stayed in Reno, the more we understood that what makes Moment special can’t be seen in pictures or described on a page. It can be felt on the mountain, and what you can feel in every pair is the passion of these few guys. It’s their passion for pushing the limits and producing tools to help you enjoy the mountains to the fullest, and it’s the quirky, seedy, unapologetic awesomeness of Reno itself that’s revealed in every radical sidecut, rocker profile, and tripped-out topsheet graphic. That’s the magic of a handmade ski, and that’s Moment. Get you some. -R. deL.