How Silverton Mountain replaced paper, spreadsheets, and scattered records with one real-time system of record, and surfaced a 25% savings hiding inside its explosive program.
Silverton Mountain manages avalanche terrain where the consequence of every decision is high and the daily mitigation tempo is relentless. Combining lift-served and hike-to terrain with a full helicopter ski program, Silverton operates one of the largest skiable footprints in North America: 1,819 lift-accessed acres and roughly 26,000 acres reached by helicopter, with runs of 2,000 to 3,000 vertical feet, all managed by a team of 36 patrollers and guides.
A program like this lives and dies on the quality of its daily decisions, and on the records that prove how those decisions were made.
Before MTNFX, Silverton's snow safety program was assembled from the same tools most operations rely on: paper forms in the patrol room, a stack of spreadsheets, and a great deal of institutional knowledge carried in a few people's heads. It worked, but it carried three quiet costs.
Meetings, observations, run lists, weather, and explosive use each lived in a different place. Reconciling them took time every day, and reconstructing a given date meant hunting across systems.
Critical process knowledge (how charges were built, how inventory was reconciled, why a path was opened or held) lived with specific staff rather than in a system. Turnover or a single absence put continuity at risk.
In a fatality, injury, or litigation scenario, an operation can be required to produce its records. Paper and scattered spreadsheets are hard to authenticate, easy to question, and nearly impossible to reconstruct cleanly under the pressure of a legal request.
Silverton consolidated its program onto MTNFX, a platform built specifically for snow safety and mountain operations, not adapted from generic tools. AM/PM forms replaced the paper meeting log; the explosive inventory module replaced the magazine spreadsheet and hand-kept ATF records; and GIS mitigation mapping with explosive overlays replaced marked-up paper maps. Season over season, this builds an interactive record of avalanche activity, shot placement, and photos in one place.
The shift wasn't just digitizing paper. Because every module shares one underlying record, data that used to be reconciled by hand now connects automatically, and that connectedness surfaced something the old process had been hiding.
MTNFX has created a more organized, professional workflow. The mapping and explosive overlays build a record of our seasonal explosive program, with an interactive view of avalanche slides and photos woven into the history of an active season.
One of the clearest examples of what that visibility unlocks came from the explosive program. Like many operations, Silverton builds its own hand charges in-house, assembling cap-and-fuse charges from component caps, fuse, and igniters. On paper, building your own looks cheaper than buying pre-assembled cap-and-fuse assemblies (CFAs). The component costs are lower, and the labor is easy to overlook because it's spread across the season and buried in routine patrol work.
Once Silverton was tracking explosive inventory, usage, and the labor around it inside MTNFX, the true loaded cost became visible for the first time: the hours patrollers spent assembling and accounting for in-house charges, plus the added complexity of reconciling component-level inventory for ATF recordkeeping.
Tracking in MTNFX showed that switching to pre-assembled CFAs from the manufacturer would cut explosive-charge costs by roughly 25%, and hand back the 40-plus hours of patroller labor now spent building charges by hand each season. Silverton plans to make the switch as it draws down its current inventory. The inefficiency was real; it simply had never been measurable before.
With the program on one platform, Silverton's institutional knowledge no longer depends on who's in the room. Process, history, and the current state of the operation live in the system itself. The whole team can pull current information in real time, there's no more chasing a paper trail to reconstruct what happened, and for a growing 36-person operation that has closed real communication gaps. The program got more durable, not just more digital.
This is the benefit that's easiest to ignore until the day it matters most. Avalanche operations carry real liability exposure, and when an incident leads to litigation or regulatory review, the operation can be compelled to produce its records.
MTNFX gives Silverton a timestamped, audit-trailed record of its daily decisions: observations, forecasts, meeting notes, run-list status, mitigation routes, and explosive use, captured contemporaneously rather than reconstructed after the fact. That record is far more defensible than paper or after-the-fact spreadsheets, and it can be produced cleanly and quickly when required. ATF-aligned explosive recordkeeping is part of the same system, so compliance documentation isn't a separate scramble.
In practical terms, the program now functions as its own insurance policy: the discipline of good daily documentation is exactly what protects the operation if those records are ever required.
MTNFX provides the system of record; it is not a substitute for legal counsel, and an operation's obligations under ATF and applicable law remain its own.
The time spent making charges, and pulling staff off other work to do it, created unnecessary workflow. Now we can move those people back to patrolling and guiding.
For Silverton Mountain, MTNFX did three things at once: it removed daily operational friction, it turned fragile institutional knowledge into a durable organizational asset, and it built a defensible record that protects the operation when it counts.
The cap-and-fuse discovery alone, a 25% savings and 40-plus patroller hours the program can redirect to the field, is the kind of return that's hard to argue with.
MTNFX has streamlined our workflow, moved the operation into a new level of professionalism, and helped close the communication gaps of a growing organization.
Purpose-built software for ski patrol, heli, cat, and backcountry operations. One platform: operations, mitigation, inventory, and a defensible record.
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