Local Hero
BEAUTY AND THE GROOMING BEASTS
Photo courtesy Halley Riley-Elliott
Most days, mechanic Halley Riley-Elliott, 21, is using a wrench on ski resort grooming machines. Her side gig involves other tools: high heels, bobby pins and curling irons.
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ast winter, Halley Riley-Elliott of Proctor, Vt., spent most of her days working as a mechanic on Okemo’s Prinoth Beast grooming machines. This winter, she’ll be rolling up her sleeves to do similar work on Killington’s fleet of Pisten-Bully groomers. In her spare time, she’ll be preparing for beauty pageants.Yes, beauty pageants. Growing up in Mount Holly, there were a few things Halley RileyElliott really wanted to do. She liked to snowboard and she thought about competing in beauty pageants, “but we really didn’t have the financial means to do that,” she says. Most of all, she wanted to own a
18 Summer 2022 vtskiandride.com
Riley-Elliott working as a mechanic at Okemo last winter. Next season she’ll be wrenching at Killington.
Jeep Wrangler. “I really, really wanted that car and when I finally got one, I paid way too much for it. then I found it was going to need some work, which would cost even more,” she said with an eye roll. Her solution: “I said, ‘You know what? I’m going to do the work myself.’ And that’s how it all started.” So, at 16 she learned how to do a tub swap. “I did the brakes all the way around. And I learned to do a clutch, a coil pack on the engine, spark plugs—a full basic tune up.Then I cleaned the frame completely because it was super crusty,” she remembers. She got so into repairing the vehicle that she switched from studying nursing at Stafford Technical Center and working at the Springfield Hospital to getting her degree in Diesel Power Technology at Vermont Technical College in 2021 and working as a mechanic at Okemo. It wasn’t hard to get the Okemo job— her brother worked there, and she had been working as an instructor there since 2015. “When I got the job as a mechanic my first boss there, Eb Kinney said ‘why didn’t you come here sooner?’ ‘ Pretty soon, she was overhauling the groomers. “One of the mechanics had left so I took his job. In the summer, we’d bring in a groomer and we completely tear it apart. We’d check the suspension, check the motor and the valves and then put it all back together and fix what’s wrong with it,” she says. “In the winter, hardly a day goes by when there’s not something to fix.” Most of the day, Riley-Elliot was busy working, but she could snowboard on her lunch hour. In her spare time, she decided to pursue one of her other dreams: competing in a beauty pageant. “I’d talked to a former beauty pageant competitor, and she said: ‘You should totally do it,’” and I thought, ‘I totally should!’” RileyElliott’s first pageant was Miss Vermont USA in 2021. Contestants are judged in three categories: Personal Interview, Swimsuit and Evening Gown. The scariest thing she’s done in recent years is, in her words, “walk onto the stage
