It’s fair to say that the first time people hear about “snow farming” they are skeptical, especially when the temperature is about to rise into the 90s.
“Pile a bunch of snow under the hot sun and expect it to last all summer — what could go wrong?!”
They are about to find out at Proctor Academy, which has set up the state’s only serious effort to store enough snow over the summer to kick-start the season at Proctor Ski Area next winter. The private school has collected a quarter-million cubic feet of snow and covered it with technology from a Finnish company called Snow Secure. With luck, 80% will still be available when it’s time to start making new snow in November.
They join a small but growing number of ski areas around the world, especially in Europe, taking what might be considered desperate action in the face of shrinking winters.
“Last year we had four ski areas in North America, now we have 14,” said Antti Lauslahti, CEO of Snow Secure U.S., which is based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. “Last year, people were curious, now people see that it works.”
A long, long history
The idea of saving water in crystalline form isn’t new. It started long ago with blocks of ice cut from lakes that were shoved into buildings with sawdust or other insulation. There are records of such an ice house existing in Mesopotamia as far back as 1780 BC, while in New Hampshire many ponds had an adjoining ice house through the early 20th century, until refrigeration killed that industry.
Storing snow outdoors for recreation, however, is much more recent. Since skiing arrived after World War II it has been done in small amounts, usually covering piles with sawdust or pine boughs. What’s new is doing it on a large scale.
“This is an industrial decision. It’s about the cost and timing and need and benefit,” said Lauslahti. “You have to make certain that you have enough snow and the staff who are trained, and also the delivery time must be there.” It takes a long time to pile up a snow hill that, in Proctor’s case, is 180 by 70 feet and up to 25 feet high.
The company says a perfectly prepared mound in snow-mountain climates will lose 10% to 20% of its volume before late fall, although 30% loss might be a more realistic expectation.
Snow Secure, which appears to be the only major company in the snow-farming business at the moment, has to fend off three major enemies of crystallized water: heat, rain and wind. They all want to break snow’s inter-molecular chemical bonds so the H2O molecules can run wild and free.
The one point in their favor is that melting snow is a phase-change operation which takes a surprising amount of energy. I learned that after an ice storm when I tried melting snow on my wood stove while the power was out. It took forever!
Snow Secure’s system involves 13-foot-wide tarps that are 50 or 80 feet long with an insulating R factor of between 9 and 12, which is impressive for material just a couple of inches thick that can be rolled out and installed in a day. My attic had that level of R factor when I bought my house decades ago, although I have a lot more insulation now — as should you.
The system also includes an integrated rain cover as well as tiles along the side to keep wind from coming in underneath.
Incidentally, this isn’t the first time a New Hampshire ski area has tried to jump-start the ski season with new tech. More than a decade ago, past owners of Tenney Mountain tried out a technology that is basically a storage unit turned into a giant refrigerator that made snow even when it couldn’t be made outdoors. That didn’t last, so I assume the cost was too great.
Cost and benefits
Proctor Academy’s system cost close to $150,000 to install, covered by an anonymous donor, according to the school. Their ski area is used by a number of places for training, some lured by its unique ski-jumping facilities, and hopes to save enough on early winter snowmaking to eventually cover the cost of last-winter snow-saving.
Lauslahti pointed out a secondary advantage to having a ready snow supply at the start of winter: It creates a cold base that will help preserve that year’s output from the snowguns. “If you do it [make snow] on the warm ground, it just melts. With this you have snow on snow, it doesn’t melt,” he said.
How well it works for Proctor Academy remains to be seen. Lauslahti said areas often start with relatively small layouts, partly to determine associated labor costs, before deciding whether to expand.
To a extent, snow farming is just another form of what ski areas have been doing with snowmaking since the 1970s — spending time and money to supplement Mother Nature’s work. Supplementing will be more and more important as higher temperatures and erratic weather keeps chipping away at our Currier & Ives image of what our winters should be like.
