A Utah man is chasing the record for the most vertical feet skied in a season. Here’s how far he’ll have to drop.

HUNTSVILLE • Like a surgeon, Tom Hart slices down the face of Sweet Revenge at Snowbasin Resort. Arms pulled in close. Two blue skis, almost touching, moving as one. No motion wasted.

It takes Hart 7 minutes, 30 seconds to link the three or so runs between the top and bottom of the Middle Bowl Express chairlift. Then he whisks through the gates and catches another ride up the high-speed, six-person lift. Then he does it again. And again. And again. And 50 more times.

For all but two days this season, the 64-year-old has skied from bell to bell, open to close. That’s 147 days (as of Monday) and counting from October to April; 134 of which he’s spent at Snowbasin. He doesn’t stop for lunch. He doesn’t break for hot cocoa. He just skis, lap after lap after lap.

“I either want to be on a lift going up, or I want to be skiing down,” Hart said. “I don’t want to be standing.”

Standing doesn’t get him anywhere. It’s inefficient. And if Hart is going to break his own Guinness World Record for the most vertical feet skied in a single season, efficiency is key.

Vertical is the measurement of the difference between a top elevation, such as the upper terminal of a lift, and a bottom elevation, such as the base of a resort.

Per Guinness guidelines, a ski season technically lasts a calendar year. Last year, between Nov. 30, 2023 and Nov. 30, 2024, Hart racked up 8,513,340 feet, 10.72 inches of vertical. That obliterated the previous Guinness World Record of 6,025,751 set in 2014-15 by skier Pierre Marc Jette of Canada.

Applying the lessons he learned from that endeavor, Hart is convinced this time he can put 10 million feet of vertical under his skis. And he believes he can do it during a conventional ski season. His self-imposed deadline is May 31.

“I knew that I could do it when I hit a million (vertical feet) on Christmas Eve ’23. I thought, ‘I’ve got this,’” the North Ogden resident said. “This season, I hit 2 million on New Year’s Day.”

When put into perspective, Hart’s pursuit is perplexing. Ten million feet is the equivalent of:

On Monday, with a month or less left at most North American ski areas, Hart sat atop the Ikon Pass leaderboard for vertical feet with 7.85 million this season. That’s 2 million more than the guy in the No. 2 spot, who nabbed the lion’s share of his 5.4 million vertical feet at Steamboat Ski Resort in Colorado. It also doesn’t include two days Hart visited at a non-Ikon resort, Colorado’s Wolf Creek. They bring his tally since October to 8,065,000.

In Utah, both the leader at Snowbird — the mountain that boasts the most vertical in the state — and the runner-up to Hart at Snowbasin amassed roughly 850,000 feet apiece this season. It took each, on average, 48 days to do it.

Hart, meanwhile, will chew up that much vertical over the next two and a half weeks. Maybe less since, he said, the Ikon app tends to short his mileage at Snowbasin. He averages about 57,000 feet per day.

“He’s just a machine,” said Scott Harris of Clinton, one of three official witnesses to Hart’s record attempt. “He’ll get off the lift. I mean, he’ll make a few turns where he needs to, but it’s just … efficient.”

Hart’s tracking of his feat is no less orderly.

A GPS tracker verifies most of his ascents and descents, which it converts into graphs and charts. He supplements that data with readouts from two apps. Typically, he opts to count the lowest number tabulated to ensure his attempt will withstand scrutiny. When Hart officially submits his information to the Guinness World Records for review, he expects it will take him up to 10 hours to upload.

Then there are the witnesses, three in total. They agree to sign an affidavit and testify, if called upon, to Guinness World Records about the veracity of Hart’s claims. He sends the witnesses multiple text updates and screenshots of his apps each day. Often they ski with him. Usually they don’t last the full session.

“I’m home by noon, one o’clock,” Harris said. “He’s still skiing.”

Hart has long had a passing interest in the Guinness World Records. And, he says, he has “big vertical in my blood.” So, shortly after he retired from his job as a commercial real estate agent in 2023, amidst record snowfall in Utah, the idea to chase history captivated him.

Every morning since Snowbasin’s 2024-25 season opener, except for two that he missed with an eye issue, Hart has arrived at the base an hour and a half before the lifts start turning. In his car, he carries at least two pairs of skis, freshly waxed for different conditions (he rarely switches them out, though, because that would be too time-consuming). At 9 a.m. — or 8 a.m. on passholder appreciation days — he and maybe a witness or two journey up the mountain via the Needles Express gondola. On most days, those minutes inside the gondola cabin are Hart’s last indoors until he takes the final gondola of the day back up the mountain at 4 p.m.

He doesn’t usually like to take gondolas and trams — taking off his skis wastes too much time. Yet he’s found that bookending his days with them is the best way to maximize his productivity.

That extra five minutes,” he said, “is like 1,200 vertical feet.”

For the seven hours in between gondola rides, Hart will take lap after lap on one of Snowbasin’s five high-speed lifts. Usually, it’s Middle Bowl, DeMoisy Express or Wildcat Express. Whether he returns to a lift, Hart said, depends solely on the lift line. If it looks too long, he’ll ski to another one. So far this season, he claims, he has never waited longer than five minutes. That includes during the hectic holiday period, where lines at some Utah resorts could be 40 minutes or more.

In terms of strategy, the speed of the lift and lack of line, he said, far outweigh the steepness of the terrain. Most runs he skis are blues, though he could easily handle something harder. After all, many at Snowbasin know him as “Racer Tom” — a nickname he said he got shortly after the 2002 Olympics, when he began using racing skis. He has also dabbled in both freestyle and speed skiing competitions.

Yet Hart recognizes he isn’t a racer. He’s plenty happy to cruise through spring slush, and he’ll slip into the trees if that’s where the powder stashes are.

In one coat pocket, Hart packs a peanut-butter-and-honey sandwich. In another, a couple hard boiled eggs. He eats them on the lift, unless there’s a blizzard. Then he might consider heading inside one of the upper lodges to remember what warmth is. He’ll only stay a minute, though. Then he’s back out there, often alone except for the lift operators.

“He will be on the DeMoisey or Middle Bowl [lift] when it’s negative 10 degrees, the only one,” Harris said. “The wind is blowing and it’s Tom on the lift. It’s Tom down at the bottom.”

Hart’s dedication has earned him admiration from Snowbasin’s lifties as well as its management. After his first record-breaking season, Hart presented general manager Davy Ratchford with an official certificate of the achievement. Hart’s voice catches when he remembers the exchange. The moment also resonates with Ratchford. As a kid growing up in Ireland, he could count on receiving a Guinness Book of World Records as one of his few gifts every Christmas.

“Of all the cool accolades that we’ve gotten recently, this one was just different,” Ratchford said. “Because I think so many of our people support and champion him, and we see and we cheer him on, and it’s just impressive. And so I was incredibly humbled by it.”

Ratchford has no plans to take aim at Hart’s record, though. As much time as the general manager spends at the mountain each season, he said he can’t imagine skiing all day every day for 140-plus days straight without a break. Even if his body could take it, his psyche probably could not.

When it comes to setting the record for the most vertical feet skied in a season, efficiency is imperative. But perhaps the key to Hart’s success is more closely tied to attitude than altitude.

“It’s much more fun than I ever imagined,” Hart said. “When I first imagined the record in ’23, I thought it would be tough, grueling. And as you can see, it’s just so much fun.

“I don’t want to go home at the end of the day.”

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