 Poster: A snowHead
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Several US ski areas are adopting 'snow farming' to preserve snow through the summer to allow earlier winter opening than would otherwise be possible.
The technology is more common in Europe but finding a foothold in the United States as snowfall has become less reliable. This year, small ski areas in Wisconsin, Idaho and Utah are trying their hand at snow farming — a sign that new, work-intensive interventions are becoming a necessity as the ski industry grapples with climate change.
“It’s going to extend the viability of skiing, especially for some of the resorts that are going to be on the margin as we have warmer winters and we get less snow,” said Nate Shake, the director of mountain operations at Bogus Basin ski resort near Boise, Idaho, where snow farming is underway for a second season.
Soldier Hollow Nordic Center, a venue near Salt Lake City originally built for the 2002 Winter Games, is trying the approach for the first time. Finding a way to maintain reliable snow is especially critical for the area because Salt Lake City is scheduled to host the Winter Olympics in 2034.
“It’s contingency planning for a bad winter in 2034,” said Luke Bodensteiner, the general manager of Soldier Hollow. Bodensteiner, who competed in the Winter Olympics in 1992 and 1994, said this year’s dismal snowpack was the worst in memory. Holding cross-country ski events “would have been a challenge if this were an Olympic year,” he said.
Bodensteiner’s team spent roughly $300,000 on a snow farming system from a Finnish company called Snow Secure.
The company sells white polystyrene mats that fold like an accordion, are about 2½ inches thick and can be installed in a day. The mats are essentially weatherproof insulation, somewhat akin to the insulation used in housing. They’re designed to cover a snow pile about the length of a football field from top to bottom.
The company’s customers generally wait for cold, dry conditions to make snow using snow guns, pile that snow up several stories high, unfold the mats, cover the pile completely and anchor the system down with weights. “It’s a little bit like a battery. The more snow you can put under that insulated system, the longer it’ll hold that cold in,” Shake said.
Antti Lauslahti, the CEO of Snow Secure, said the stored snow will typically lose about 20% of its mass over the course of a summer. But the process allows ski areas to make snow in conditions that lead water droplets to freeze more rapidly. “The snow quality is better when you make it in cold weather,” he said. “You make it really fast, you make a really good quality and you use less energy.”
Lauslahti said some in the U.S. worried that summer temperatures would climb too high for the system to be effective, but so far it has worked.
Last year, Bogus Basin was one of three North American areas to pilot a Snow Secure program. During the summer, a monitoring system recorded temperatures up to 119 degrees Fahrenheit on the exterior of the mat system, but it kept the snow at an average of 37 degrees, Shake said.
In October, crews unpeeled the mats and found about 80% of the snow had survived. Even though Bogus Basin had its warmest November on record, it was able to open that month.
“We opened on the snow that we saved,” Shake said, adding that without snow farming, “we wouldn’t had a Thanksgiving opening at all.
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