AUBURN – Kingfield native Josh Lembert will have good seats at the 2010 Winter Olympics. They’ll allow him to see his handiwork – the half-pipe at the snowboard competitions that he helped design and build.

“There will be some sense of ownership,” said Lembert, who launched his own snow park design, build and consulting business eight years ago. “It should be a great time.”

A competitive snowboarder until injuries sidelined him, Lembert and his company, Snow Grind, have gone around the world creating the infrastructure for snowboarding at ski resorts from Argentina to British Columbia, the site of the 2010 World Olympics.

He is working with a Swiss company that manufactures specialty equipment for snowparks to create the Olympic arena. The Zaugg, (the name of the equipment and company) will build a half-pipe that has taller walls and a deeper bowl than was used at the 2006 Olympics.

“It gives the riders a bigger radius to air out of the half-pipe and a bigger landing zone back in,” Lembert said.

The new Zaugg uses a 22-foot attachment to carve out the half-pipe – 4 feet bigger than the conventional 18-foot attachment used at most ski resorts.

“The taller walls mean you can go higher out of the pipe – 20 feet above the deck or 40 feet from the bottom of the pipe,” Lembert said. The bigger air means more time to execute moves like the 1080, where a rider spins around four times before landing.

Lembert said he got a taste of the Zaugg while he worked at Sunday River and was asked to find a machine to create its half-pipe. Although the machines were popular in Europe, they were slow to catch on stateside.

“Sunday River was the first ski resort to buy one,” he said.

The machine operates like a Snowcat groomer, except instead of a plow, the scythe-like Zaugg is attached at the front. It runs like a big auger, cutting through a wall of snow and shooting the snow up and out to create the walls and deck of a half-pipe.

“It’s the best-selling half-pipe machine in the market right now,” Lembert said. “There are about 100 in the U.S.”

But the relative scarcity of the 22-foot model is making it a challenge to find resorts to run the Olympic trials for snowboarders. Lembert said only four mountains have the bigger Zaugg and they need six host sites for the U.S. qualifying trials. Loon Mountain in New Hampshire is considering a 22-foot Zaugg, he said, the only resort in New England to do so that he knows of. The models run about $110,000.

“It would be a huge event for any resort that hosted,” he said.

With the Olympics still a couple of years away, he’s got plenty of things to do now. A good part of Lembert’s time is spent training snow technicians to build half-pipes and snowboard terrains. He said the sport needs to have consistency with its competitive arenas.

“You try to teach best practices,” he said, noting it’s possible that five resorts using the same equipment can create half-pipes of varying widths and heights. “How you communicate with other people at resorts is important. We’re trying to get everybody on the same page, to follow the same practices.”

This summer he gets to take his expertise to South America.

Despite having just moved to Taylor Pond, he and his wife and 5-year-old daughter are getting ready for a trip to Argentina where Lembert will be working at Mount Cathedral resort in the Patagonia range.

It could be the launch pad for SnowGrind to move into the next generation. His daughter will participate in a snowboarding program for kids there.

“She snowboards – it’s great,” he said. “I think we’ve got a cool little family thing going on here.”