Not everyone loves the recent cold weather, but over the last week or so, ski area operators in Connecticut have been embracing the frigid temperatures.
The colder air means that they can make snow and open sooner, even if you’re looking out of your window and not seeing any snow on the ground.
“We’ve made snow the last few nights,” Sean Hayes, the president and CEO of Powder Ridge Mountain Park and Resort in Middlefield, said Dec. 3. “Starting (Dec. 4), we will run (snowmaking equipment) 24 hours a day through (last) Saturday, which will open up all of our primary trails.”
Powder Ridge opened on Black Friday with one trail and tubing. Mohawk Mountain Ski Area in Cornwall opened Dec. 6. Ski Sundown in New Hartford has been busy making snow since last week and is scheduled to open Friday, Dec. 12 at 3 p.m. Mount Southington is scheduled to open Saturday at 8:30 a.m.
With the lack of consistent snowfall in Connecticut in recent years, all of the local ski areas rely on snowmaking, which has grown more sophisticated as well as more energy-efficient in recent years, to keep their trails open all winter.
“Right now I think most of the ski areas in Connecticut have enough regular snowmaking capability that if you give us 3-4 days, we can open our primary trails,” Hayes said last week.
Powder Ridge started making snow in October so the area can be open the day after Thanksgiving using what Hayes calls “The Snow Factory.”
“We began making snow on Oct. 16,” Hayes said. “We left it in piles on one trail. We have been advertising for two years that we guarantee we’ll be open on Black Friday. We’re open.
“(The Snow Factory) is two giant container trailers stacked on top of each other with huge condensers on top and it basically makes ice inside it, then huge compressors push it out down the hill. It’s ground up and pushed it down the hill so it looks and feels like regular snow.
“As long as it sits in a pile in October, it protects itself. The day before we open, we push it all out and we open our tubing lanes and skiing and boarding on that one trail on Black Friday.”
Ski Sundown makes as much snow as it can when the temperatures fall, then stores it in piles on the mountain.
“I guess the biggest way we’ve adapted is put a lot of infrastructure in place so we can make sure when we have the ideal conditions, we can make as much snow as possible,” said Ulla Jacobs, the marketing director at Ski Sundown.
“We’ve doubled our water capacity in the last few years so when we have those temperatures we need – which are in the high teens or mid 20s – that we can make as much as we possibly can. Then we stockpile it. That’s the way we’ve been working the last few years. We have little areas around the whole mountain where it’s a little bit shadier so they build it into a pile. It keeps it cold.”
On Dec. 4 and 5, when the temperatures dropped into the single digits in New Hartford, Jacobs said earlier last week, “We’re going to be making (snow) like crazy.”
The ideal temperature to make snow, Hayes said, is around 27 degrees.
“Snowmaking depends on what’s called the wet bulb temperature,” he said. “It’s a mixture of the ambient temperature and the humidity in the air. We started the other night, it was 34 degrees, but it was less than 50 percent humidity. The wet bulb temperature was in the 26-27 degree range.
“If you have 17 degrees on a dry night, the wet bulb temperature is zero. You’re pushing out powder – you can make snow with a water hose.”
What does he say to people who say “it’s not real snow?”
“The stuff we make with our fan guns and regular snowmaking equipment is real snow,” Hayes said. “You cannot tell the difference with a groomed surface.
“We can also make that beautiful powder. The guns are capable of creating different levels of product. This week we want base. We’re going to push out as much water as we possibly can.”
Hayes said Powder Ridge has adapted its marketing strategy. The area has a Winterfest every weekend through December, with food trucks and music, along with tubing and a play area for small children.
Later in the season, the emphasis moves towards local skiers and school groups.
“We’ve shifted the business model because Mother Nature has changed, in that it’s a weekday-weeknight business,” he said. “Our business model is really about those school groups coming in every week and that starts the first week of January so we need the entire mountain open by that first week of January.”
Mount Southington has added new automated snowmaking equipment that is more energy efficient.
“We don’t rely on natural snowfall to have a successful season,” Mount Southington general manager Brian McCloskey said last week.
“Last year was a great season for us and for all of the Connecticut ski areas and a big part of that was because it was a colder winter than we’ve had in the last few winters. Our last snowmaking day was the end of January which is pretty unheard of for us. We’re usually making more snow in the middle of February, to get ready for President’s Week but we didn’t have to do that last year. The temperatures allowed what snow we had made to stick around.”
McCloskey is in his 10th season at Mount Southington and he said with the exception of one season, the rest “have been really pretty good.”
“I think COVID also helped to get skiing to the forefront for a lot of new people,” he added. “And we’ve kept them.”
All the ski area operators agreed that sometimes it’s a challenge to get people to come to ski if there is no snow in their backyard.
“It’s harder,” Hayes said. “If there’s snow in your backyard, people think of it. The tubing is critical – we’re not relying on skiing at Powder Ridge, we have tubing, the snow play area – there’s a lot of things to do here.”