Mountain dreams made to order: Wagner Custom handcrafts skis for the high-end market.

• Author: Clark, Cassi
• Position: Attitude at altitude

Set off Colorado Highway 145 in the minuscule town of Placerville, in a small peach stucco building with giant solar panels on the roof, is Wagner Custom. The only sign outside is a red star. No name, nothing that screams "ski manufacturer."

Wagner Custom handcrafts skis that are designed especially for each client like custom-fitted boots. Inside the front door, the year-old company plans to have a showroom with a fireplace where customers can fill out their profiles and have their current skis tested on the tensile tester wired to a computer database.

Not even doctors ask as much about their patients as Wagner Custom does. Its questionnaire includes nearly a hundred questions about skiing style, physical information, injury history, goals, terrain preferences and opinions about past and present gear.

The next room, unseen from outside, is a large clean room with a ski press, and multiple workbenches where owner Pete Wagner and his nine employees layer jigsaw-like ski materials by hand.

"We're a ski business in a ski town," Wagner says.

That's why Wagner chose the small town downstream from Telluride, rather than staying in Boulder where he received his MBA, and assembled his advisory board of Front Range businessmen, biomechanics experts, kinesiologists, ski designers, physical therapists, racing coaches and angel investors.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

"I've got probably the best ski tuner in the state of Colorado working here," he says. "I've got all these incredible mechanics and people who have years of experience doing ski tuning, ski racing, ski coaching, ski sales, ski marketing. There's an amazing level of talent here."

Outside, a garage houses industrial base-grinding machines, a band saw, a homemade sidewall bevel with a skate wheel, and the big arched CNC (computer numeric controlled) milling machine that cuts the solid wood cores with precision up to one-four-thousandth of an inch as directed by a sawdust-covered networked computer.

This season, high-end ski boot fitters all over the state, including Larry's Boot Fitting in Boulder, will host Wagner Custom kiosks where customers can choose their graphics, and fill out their profiles...