A nighttime storm brought a fresh coating of snow to Summit County on Wednesday, Oct. 14, marking some lower-elevation parts of the county's first true flakes of the season and allowing higher-elevation ski areas to officially kick off snowmaking.
Loveland Ski Area, Keystone Resort, Copper Mountain Resort and Arapahoe Basin Ski Area all fired up their snowguns during the storm, readying their slopes for the incoming ski season. Breckenridge Ski Resort started snowmaking a few days later, on Friday morning.
According to Shayna Silverman, A-Basin's communications manager, mid-October is generally when conditions first become right for snowmaking.
"We're right on track," she said.
The snowguns and the snowmakers
Around 8 a.m. Thursday, A-Basin's vice president of mountain operations Louis Skowyra steered a lifted pickup truck over windy, unpaved roads, taking himself and snowmaking manager Blair James to higher elevations, where snowmaking had begun a few hours earlier.
Though the roads were bumpy, shaking the entire cab of the truck, Skowyra kept a steady, expert hold on his plastic Pepsi cup full of coffee, eyes firmly on the slippery road ahead.
Parking near the Black Mountain Express lift, James and Skowyra stepped down from the truck and began checking on A-Basin's fleet of snowguns.
Silverman noted that A-Basin's snowmaking operations are far smaller than other nearby resorts. Along with the 20-or-so snowguns in the ski area's arsenal, A-Basin employs around five snowmakers to man the process, including James.
"That's a really nimble team," Silverman said. "It's amazing what we can do to be one of the first resorts to open every year with that small of an operation."
Nearby Keystone, which is also typically one of the county's first resort's to open, has over 600 snowguns, according to a Tuesday morning press release announcing the resort's start to snowmaking.
But making snow is a complex science for everyone, no matter the size of the operation.
At A-Basin, water is pumped from a small reservoir near the base of the ski area. It then travels through underground water lines and into the guns.
"We can pump the water up the mountain, and we make it so that it's under quite a lot of pressure," James explained. "Then we set our snow guns where we want to make snow, and then we wait until we have our specified startup temperature, which is about 26.5 (degrees Farenheit)."
And even when temperatures drop low enough to make snow, resorts still need to consider other factors like humidity and cloud cover.
"At the moment, it's high humidity, which makes it more difficult," James said on Thursday morning, when relative humidity at A-Basin hit 89%, according to OpenSnow. "When it's low humidity ... we can put a lot more of our moisture out into the air to make snow. However, when it's like this, we can't quite put as much out because there's already moisture in the air."
And though clouds bring snow in nature, in the world of snowmaking, clouds can also complicate the delicate process.
"It's actually better to make snow with clear skies because it's drier," Silverman said. "Clouds trap in heat and humidity."
All things considered, machine-made snow is indistinguishable from natural snow, according to Silverman.
"Man-made snow is the same as natural snow, it's just water and cold temperatures," she said. "Someone ... asked me about plastics in man-made snow. It's not plastic, it's real snow."
The only difference is that snow made by ski resorts lasts longer than natural snow, Skowyra explained.
"One of the things that snowmaking has done for us is more reliably allowed us to open earlier and stay open later, which is good. We get people skiing longer. We get people to work sooner," he said. "Man-made snow is more durable than natural snow. It's denser. It's firmer."
How could drought and climate change impact snowmaking?
The increased durability of machine-made snow could act as a "buffer" that mitigates some of the impacts of a warming climate, according to Skowyra.
He also explained that A-Basin's high elevation -- with a base at 10,780 feet -- means it should be less impacted by climate change than other ski areas across the globe.
"One of the inimitable resources of A-Basin is our elevation, so we're going to be able to weather this storm better than most other people," he said. "Skiing in New Zealand, skiing in Southern California, Tahoe, Aspen -- it might be pretty tricky in our lifetimes, but we're in a good spot to be able to deal with that."
Skowyra said that A-Basin is also well-equipped to handle drought because the ski area has "plenty of water rights" and sits at the top of the water system, meaning it depends less on water flowing downstream than other parts of the country.
And although last season's historically low snowpack left local reservoirs and rivers far dryer than normal, the subpar amount of water in the Summit County's system won't significantly impact snowmaking at A-Basin, both Silverman and Skowyra said.
"It is better for everybody when it's a little bit wetter, when the streams are flowing more, for sure," Skowyra said. "This drought is not going to dramatically change the amount of water we can use and convert into snow."
Some of that is because A-Basin already keeps its snowmaking to a minimum.
"We're covering 5% to 6% of our mountain with snowmaking, and we are not trying to make that 5% to 6% 8 feet deep and lasting until July. We work in a ski area. It's going to snow," Skowyra said.
Additionally, A-Basin's snowmaking system is cyclical, which allows a small amount of water to be reused in different forms.
"The smart people, the "-ologists' will tell you it's non-consumptive," Skowyra said. "80% to 90% is returning to the watershed. Describing this whole snowmaking concept as a reservoir is a good way of doing it. We are storing it here, and it's going to go back into Dillon Reservoir."
Even a small amount of early-season snow -- like what A-Basin received in this week's storm -- helps get that water cycle moving along.
"It's actually great that we have a lot of this natural snow early in the season," Silverman said. "Doesn't actually do much to get us open, but what it does do is it sticks on (the) northern facing aspect, whereas the southern facing aspects across from Loveland Pass -- that's all going to melt off and return to our watershed."
The county's other four ski areas declined requests for interviews from the Summit Daily News about the impact of drought on their snowmaking operations. In statements provided instead, Copper Mountain and Loveland both separately acknowledged existing water challenges and shared that their snowmaking systems, like A-Basin's, are as water-conscious as possible.
"We prioritize snowmaking on essential terrain, reduce snowmaking volumes where possible and adjust our operations based on natural snowfall. Our modernized snowmaking infrastructure also allows us to make the most efficient use of water and energy during available snowmaking windows," Copper Mountain's statement said. "Snowmaking acts as a form of water storage, with approximately 80% of the water used returning to the watershed as the snow melts."
A joint statement from Keystone and Breckenridge said that the resorts "plan for a full range of snow and snowmaking conditions."
"We go into every season prepared for multiple scenarios at all of our resorts," the statement said. "Our plans are designed to deliver a strong start to the season for the employees, communities and local businesses that depend on it."
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