The problem was that the winch cat couldn't get up our double blue square run to get to the top to hook up. Wouldn't do it. There were two options to get to the top of this peak; one w/snowmaking going on, on it, and one that was 30+ of bottomless, no base, fresh. We knew there was no way the cat was making it up the bottomless run, so we tried the double square run w/snow making. This is a run BTW, that gets groomed every night (normally) w/free cats. We generally only winch on it for rebuilds. Anyway, our Op tried every climbing trick in the book, and it just wasn't happening. We were getting "denied" from one of our basic, regular peaks! Crazy.
Here's where the story gets good. Or not, depending on how conservative or agreesive you may be. I got another op in one of our 500's and had him try the same climb. "Punch a hole to the top", I told him...and he did. He made it to the top in about 20 minutes, with few problems with that bad-assed 5hundo. Then he came back down, turned around and I had the winch op hook the winch cable to the pintle of the 500. The 500 op then headed back up the run, pulling the winch's cable, as we payed out the cable manually. Just enought to prevent slack, but fast enough so as not to hold the 500 back much. The 500 charged to the top (again), then set his break. We then "Barred up" the winch to ~200 bar, and climed the run, no problem. Once at the top, the winch cat was able to hook up to it's proper anchor, and then get to teh job of track packing the insane amount of snow on our runs...thereby recapturing the hill from nature for our cats, and snowmobile travel!
It was somewhat unconventional, I think, but worked out, wicked good.