Resort History & Snowmaking

Now a little bit about the weather. Just like Mother Nature, we need temperatures of 32 degrees or lower to make snow. But 32 doesn't always equal 32! Snowmakers work from the "Wet Bulb" temperature. The wet bulb takes the amount of humidity in the air and evaporative cooling into account. The wet bulb temperature is usually colder than dry bulb (the kind most people use) so it may appear that we can make snow above 32 degrees at times. The rule of thumb is that as the temperature and humidity go down, the amount of snow we make goes up!

Roundtop Mountain Resort has snowmaking ponds with a total capacity of over 35 million gallons! All of the machine made snow you see on the slopes started out in our snowmaking ponds...and will eventually return there after the ski season ends.

In order to make snow, we need to pump cold water up the hill - with our new pumps that's 5,000 gallons per minute when running at full capacity. Our vertical turbine water pumps take water from the ponds and pump it up the mountain. You may notice the fountain in the snowmaking pond near the maintenance area. That's not just for looks, it helps cool the water, which makes snowmaking work better.

But water is only half of the story. Most snow making equipment also requires compressed air to propel the water into the air. Our compressors can produce up to 30,750 cfm of air at full capacity. Producing compressed air is the most expensive part of snowmaking. Fortunately with the installation of new high efficiency snowmaking equipment our need for compressed air has gone down dramatically allowing us to make more snow, faster, while using less energy!

Unfortunately, compressed air comes out of the compressor very hot (180 degrees), obviously not good for snowmaking. Before the air goes up the hill, it is run through huge air coolers to bring the temperature down to a more reasonable 36 degrees. Even the "airless" fan guns require a little compressed air to operate.

So now we have a lot of cold water and a lot of cold air - what's next? There are two sets of pipes running under every slope - over 9 miles of pipe in all. One set distributes air, one set distributes water to over 350+ snowmaking hydrant pairs.

When we are ready to make snow, we connect "snow guns" to the snowmaking stations. The "guns" allow our snowmaking crew to mix just the right amount of air and water to produce snow on the slopes. There are three basic types of snow "guns".

1. Have you noticed the new snowmaking equipment that looks like giant sticks sprouting up around the mountain. Those are high efficiency snow guns. They rely on water pressure to make snow and use much less energy than other types of equipment. The sticks are so tall because it allows the water time to freeze as it drifts back to the slopes as snow.

2. Airless (or fan) guns use a large fan to propel the water into the air to make snow. They only require a very small amount of compressed air to keep things moving. On the front of the gun there is a series of rings with water nozzles on them. As the temperature goes up or down, we can open or close rings to adjust the amount of water we are using.

Most of our airless guns are mounted on towers. The reason is that if we spray the water high into the air, it has more time to fall before it hits the slope. That gives it more time to freeze and dry out. Since we can use more water, we can make more snow. In addition colder/dryer snow is a better surface for skiing and snowboarding too.

3. Air/Water guns rely on compressed air to propel the water through the gun and into the air to make snow. Obviously they use a lot of compressed air to accomplish this. However, since we can adjust both the amount of water and the amount of compressed air very precisely, this system tends to work well in marginal temperatures. However we don't need to use this type of equipment very much anymore.

First, it is important to note that snowmaking doesn't consume water, it only stores it as snow on our slopes. The water used for snowmaking is surface water that we have stored in our snowmaking ponds. The ponds fill up naturally from rainfall and snow melt. At the end of the season, the snow melts and the water returns to the ponds.