What’s with snowmaking these days? While Washington did receive a good amount of early season snowfall this season, some resorts – such as Mission Ridge – rely on a good amount of pumped snow to keep the runs fresh throughout the dry spells. Here’s the latest update from Mission regarding their contribution to the base.
“A little update on our progress since everyone these days is only interested in new snow and when it is coming. It is here at Mission Ridge.
At Mission Ridge snowmaking has now logged 710 hours of production since 11-1-11, the 300hp in the area which feeds 21 of our hydrants on Mimi and Tumwater and also doubles as our reservoir fill line has pumped 19 million gallons. When we started on 11-1-11 we had 18 million gallons in the reservoir. We opened the mountain with Sunspot, Tumwater, Mimi and Pika Peak. Next nailed the face of Tumwater 3 where snowmaking does not normally exist in order to get that opened early. Moving then on to Tower 14 slope and lower Toketie opening up more terrain and acres. Then, stringing out thousands of feet of hose and with two portable diesel generators all of Nastar was built up from scratch. Never has this been done before. “It is awesome and kicked our asses”, said Jon Wax, head of snowmaking. We are now working on finishing up Lip-Lip the same way which we hope to have ready for this weekend. That means that two runs without snowmaking capabilities previously have opened up for skiing thanks to these extreme measures. Check em out! Once Lip Lip is done the generators will be able to move to Chair 4 and start work over there. We continue to run three guns in B.24 for volume to begin building the jumps.
We received two demo guns from SMI. A Puma fan gun and a Viking stick gun. The Puma can be run in manual or fully auto mode. All of our existing guns are manual which means our crew needs to make all the water and wind adjustments according to the temperature. The Puma, which came with a hydrant actuator, can be set up to run itself. The gun will make its own adjustments at the water hydrant and will adjust its valves to the nozzles via info it receives from its own onboard weather station. The Puma works great in warmer temps and is capable of converting 130 gallons a minute into snow in cold temps. The Viking is sled mounted for easy transportation and uses less energy to operate than our larger fan guns.”
