Snowmaking, in essence, is a hubris of inverse, Ahabian proportions. Rather than roaming the seas in search of the White Whale, snowmakers roam the alpine heights trying to turn whales into the elusive white carpet which can then be spread from trail-edge to trail-edge, mountaintop to base area, allowing the resort to open. They do it for pennies over minimum wage. Next time you see one, maybe give them a thumbs-up.
The process of snowmaking has been written about and described many times in many trade magazines. These articles usually cite the obvious: to make snow, water must be shot into the air, battered into pieces which can fall and freeze into snow crystals.
Sounds easy, right? The process usually involves collecting water, pumping water, compressing air, piping both to the desired location, carbureting the two through a snowgun where the air batters the water which then magically becomes snow as it majestically falls to earth. Still sounds pretty easy.
They usually neglect to mention the one constant to any and all snowmaking operations. Someone has to do it, and that someone is your friendly neighborhood snowmaker. If you’ve had even one run this year, maybe go find one and thank him or her.
Some articles even mention the most offensive (to a snowmaker) myth in the industry, “fully-automated snowmaking.” If you want to make a room full of snowmakers laugh, mention this to them as they take a break between gun-runs.
Anyone who’s blown snow for more than a year or two will be quick to point out that if you try to pump water out of something that is sitting high in the wind on the side of a mountain in sub-zero temperatures… sooner or later you’re going to have problems.
Sooner or later someone has to go up there and fix it, which is to say, smash the ice with steel until it falls clear from the gun. The only such thing as an automated snowmaker is an over-tired, underappreciated person, smiling through rime ice under a hardhat with a steel pipe in one hand and a coffee in the other. And, they love getting thanked.
Now, in a year like last year where prodigious snows fell and the woods were deep and powder hounds from Jay to Ascutney were tearing through a ski year that can only be described as epic, it’s pretty tough being a snowmaker. The snowmaker isn’t the bringer of riding, the deliverer of skiing. The snowmaker is the person who ruined your trail with a wet gun, who froze your goggles, or who rimed the base of your skis or board.
It’s tough being a snowmaker in a year like that. Most of us don’t appreciate that even in years like that, they and the groomers are the only reason that high traffic areas aren’t brown: load and unload areas, tops of pitches, inside corners, knobs and rocks, waterbars and crevices, or…say…the entire base area. Years like that even ski patrol tends to forget what the snowmakers are doing for the mountain. Not much thanks in a year like that.
In a year like this, however, the snowmaker delivers the whole hill, and they don’t do it for the pay. They do it because they love to make snow. It is a select breed, and the unwilling are quickly culled. There is a term they use to describe a new employee who tries a gun-run and just keeps going straight to his car in the parking lot and heads home without even punching out. Snowmakers call these “one-run-and-doners.” And it seems every hill gets at least one of these a year. But, at least these folks tried it. You can’t blame them either. The job is horrific and dangerous, and the work is backbreaking.
Anyone who wants to truly understand what the job takes out of a human body, just saunter behind any snowmaking shop anywhere in the world come spring and look at the heaps and piles of twisted, mangled, steel, gun frames; burst pipe sections; shattered fan cowlings; snapped-in-half snowmobiles; splintered wood; and shards of plastic. Then glance inside the shop at the true heroes of the ski industry and wonder that their equipment can look like this piled up, over here, and that they can be piled up in the shop telling stories and laughing at the danger, over there.
They’ll be the ones laughing deep from the belly as one of their fellow snowmakers tells the latest close-call story. They usually start something like, “No, Bro, I was heading to upper-upper-FIS cutoff on the Scandic-II, the one with no brakes or headlight…” and they usually end something like, “…So I’m upside down, head downhill, on my back, crab crawling as fast as a can as the old Scandic is flipping end over end right on top of where I just was and there’s Timmy… laughing at me as the sled and I go by.”
There’s a joke in the ski industry. It goes something like this: Lock two snowmakers in a room. The room has no way in and no way out. The walls of the room are covered wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling with rubber. Throw two brand-new tennis balls in the room with the snowmakers and come back ten minutes later…one tennis ball is broken and the other one is missing.
The joke will usually break a room full of snowmakers into hysterics. But the true insight here isn’t into the carelessness or ineptitude of the snowmakers, the insight here is into the challenge of the job.
Nothing survives on the hill for long, unless it’s made out of what snowmakers are made out of, and what that is…who knows? But if you bottled it you’d be rich.
Next time you’re skiing or riding this year, think about hugging a snowmaker. Hopefully next year is the kind of year that makes us forget they’re there…until we ride under one of their guns and our goggles get frozen.
