Weird Vancouver weather calls for snow farming on local mountains

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      Let’s hear it for the champions of winter: the snow farmers. If there was one group that carried the torch during the local white world’s driest stretch in decades, it was the trio of operations managers in charge of snowmaking at the Cypress Mountain, Grouse Mountain, and Mount Seymour resorts.

      Aided by staff equally game to harvest a crop—any crop—of white crystals, few of the makers could recall having worked longer or harder to keep runs open for local downhillers.

      “I’ve never seen anything like this winter,” Mount Seymour’s Dennis Watson told the Georgia Straight by phone. “In my 27 years here, we’ve had dips and valleys, but not like this. Generally, we always have a good start with at least enough snow for the Christmas break. That’s really important in our business.”

      Mount Seymour is the only North Shore destination to rely purely on natural snowfall, and Watson gave full credit to his team of five. “They are definitely the unsung heroes of the year,” he said. “Since we stay open until 10 at night, the crew couldn’t start until then. They worked graveyard shifts with excavators, front-end loaders, and snow cats to gather and spread whatever we could find. And we used good old muscle power as well to go into the forest, shovel snow onto tarps, and haul it out onto the slopes.”

      Watson’s Grouse Mountain counterpart, Tod Hebron, has overseen snow-farming there since 1987. He told the Straight by phone that until the arrival of a series of storms in mid-February that dropped two metres of snow in two weeks, what saved his mountain was the cold snap that settled over the West Coast in December. “Even if we didn’t get an early snowfall, at least we were able to power up our 38 snow guns and begin covering some of the weather-beaten spots in high-traffic areas like the Cut.”

      Grouse Mountain installed its snowmaking system—the first on the North Shore—four decades ago to ensure adequate coverage for World Cup ski races. Has technology changed much since then? “Although fan guns have replaced the original air-and-water system, the basic principles are still the same,” Hebron said. “Either way, unlike natural, individually shaped snowflakes, the guns and fans produce more of a velvety ice crystal than a snow crystal. We let it go through a curing cycle. It starts off wet, wet, wet at the beginning, then hardens, which makes it easier for grooming.” Hebron said that although it is possible to make snow at temperatures as high as 4 ° C, the snow at that reading has the consistency of “elephant snot”.

      The art of farming snow—both actively with machinery and passively with fences and berms—isn’t new. Like all things nature-related, it’s not an exact science, either. Hebron recalled that when he started at Grouse in 1984, the standard practice was to run a snow fence down the middle of the Cut—a wide swath of open terrain on the mountain’s south face—and let snow mound up in drifts that would then be carted elsewhere. “We snow-farm now with hydrants at the bottom of the Cut and Expo runs, making a contingency supply that groomers can spread as needed.”

      At Mount Seymour, Watson said, snow fences aren’t that effective. “We don’t use them because of our varied terrain. Given how much snow can fall in such a short space of time—as we’ve seen since things turned around in February—ours would be buried before we could dig them out.”

      When it comes to making the best use of available terrain, Mount Seymour and Cypress Mountain have a decided advantage. With extensive parking lots—fields of plenty, as it were—in close proximity to downhill runs, large quantities of snow can be plowed, harvested, and shipped to market, or at least the terrain park.

      That’s where the Straight met up with Cypress Mountain’s Steve Williamson. “I looked out my office window and saw Mount Strachan [one of Cypress’s trio of peaks, with Black Mountain and Hollyburn Mountain] completely snow-covered for the first time this year,” he said. Williamson and his crew of four employ an array of snow-farming techniques, including strategic placement of steel-frame cages enmeshed with strapping to capture snowfall. When full, the cages are winched uphill by cable-towing snow cats and deposited for grooming machines to spread the snow. “We also put sluices in the trees to channel snow down onto runs much like chutes on a cement mixer. That way runs were kept open by patrollers and ski-safety crews who spent hours shovelling. Thank God we finally got snow!”

      The snowmaking technology of nucleating water molecules with compressed air and blowing the seltzer skyward was pioneered at Boyne Mountain, Michigan, headquarters of Cypress Mountain’s current owners, Boyne Resorts. “We measure snow quality on a scale of zero to five, driest to wettest,” Williamson explained. “Our production snow comes in at 3.5—very dense and very packy. For open terrain, we make drier, fluffier snow by pointing the gun barrels higher to increase the hang time and give the crystals more time to freeze.”

      With 37 cannons in his arsenal, Williamson commands a force that should keep the runs open well into April for Cypress’s annual “King of Spring” festivities. That’s how these North Shore farmers reap what they snow.

      Comments

      1 Comments

      Forest

      Mar 10, 2014 at 1:17pm

      Snow farming! How's that for green-washing the C0 2 intensive practice of making snow for climate-change challenged mountains! The irony is mind-boggling.