Snow-making, snow-pushing, snow-farming all help preseve conditions at cross-country ski areas

It’s been a challenging winter for the Woodstock Nordic Center, as it has for Nordic and Alpine ski areas across New England.

Nick Mahood, director of the beautiful cross-country ski center in Woodstock, Vermont — part of the Woodstock Inn and Resort, which includes the Saskadena Six Alpine ski area, the fabled inn and its five restaurants, and well-stocked retail store offering cross-country ski and Alpine touring gear and clothing — had little choice but to ramp up what the center has been doing now for a few years, and that is "snow-farming."

After the relatively isolated instances when natural snow falls these days, Mahood's crew spreads it and stores it for lean times. They also take snow that has been carefully stashed dirt-free and salt-free in parking lots and move it to the center's two networks of 45 kilometers of trails spread between Mount Peg and Mount Tom. And they push snow onto trails from open areas like fields and the golf course.

Preparing in the warm months

Meanwhile, as this is just the latest in a series of snow-lean seasons (even in central-northern Vermont where Woodstock sits at a doable, two-hour, 40-minute drive from the Worcester area), the Woodstock staff also has been working hard in the offseason to maintain trails, including ensuring reliable drainage and clearing tree and branch blowdowns, so that terrain can open with as little as 3 to 6 inches of natural snow.

Add to that two new state-of-the-art Prinoth Husky snow-grooming machines.

The result is that nearly the entire Woodstock Nordic Center is snow-covered and open for skiing. That's amazing considering how many rain days and dry spells we've suffered through this season.

"This year we've really upped our snow-moving and snow-farming game. In the past, a couple of years ago, we were a little bit more just responsive," Mahood, 50, a former University of New Hampshire Nordic racer who also coaches cross-country teams. "Now we're very proactive. As soon as there's enough snow on the ground to start pushing snow, we start pushing snow even if we've got a good stretch of weather come winter coming in. It allows us to get through tough stretches in winter."

More advances are coming to the Woodstock Nordic Center that will help it navigate the erratic New England weather.

Snowmaking has arrived in cross-country

To combat the dearth of natural snowfall, Alpine ski areas have long used machine-made snow to stay open and provide a decent snow surface during weather swings like the ones we're seeing this season. Now the biggest areas and also smaller but technologically advanced ones like Wachusett in Princeton have evolved their snowmaking systems with digital technology, high-energy efficiency snow guns and powerful pumping and control systems.

In recent years, cross-country ski areas have started to get into snowmaking. Today about 50 Nordic areas in the country and about a dozen in New England employ some kind of snowmaking system. Notably, the Weston Ski Track just outside of Boston was an early entrant. The small but busy cross-country center is open a lot more days than you would think, even just a day or two after significant rain.

That kind of capability is within view for Woodstock, Mahood said.

"Snowmaking, yes, it's coming," he said.

The Nordic center was expecting to run a pilot snowmaking project this season, but instead was forced to divert money and time into fixing considerable damage to the ski trails from Vermont's severe flooding last July.

"If a cross-country center doesn't put in snowmaking in the next two to five years, I think they're going to really struggle," he said.

Reese Brown, a Woodstock resident and executive director of the Cross-Country Ski Areas Association, totally concurs.

The critical thing is for cross-country areas to remain open, even in low slow times, Brown said, even if it's only on a few kilometers of trail.

"Looking at Alpine skiing, 30 years ago not many ski areas had an extensive snowmaking system, and now they all have a massive snowmaking system, or they're out of business. I think that's coming to cross-country for sure," he said. "If you're open, you can sell rentals, you can sell lessons, you can sell retail, and you can sell food. If you're not open, nobody's coming."

On the regional and national level the 2023-24 season has been one to forget, Brown said.

"It's been a tough year for everybody, even the Alpine areas that have massive snowmaking systems have had limited trails as compared to their normal year," he said.

The lesson from all this is that's important for cross-country areas to take the same approach as Woodstock.

"People on both sides, including Nordic, are forecasting winters like this and they are preparing for winters like this," he said. "So they're looking at the offseason and saying 'this part of the trail system washed out, so let's fix this drainage ditch.' How do we take what we know and what can we do to prepare for that low-snow winter?

"When everyone's getting feet and feet of snow, every ski area is a hero," Brown added. "But it's the challenging ones that affect our ski areas."

Positive signs amid a down season

But there are some bright spots in the cross-country landscape.

Participation is up from its pre-pandemic levels, meaning that many of the people who flocked to cross-country during those years have stuck with it even if skier visits are down this year due to sparse snow.

From the 2021-22 season to the 2022-23 season, participation was up about 8.5%.

"So we feel very bullish about the number of people skiing," Brown said. "Where we're concerned is the weather and the lack of winter-feeling weather in so many places now that has affected our skier days as well as retail sales."

Another factor driving youth and adult participation these days is the success of U.S. Nordic superstar Jesse Diggins, a Minnesota native who was the 2023 World Cup champion and gold medal winner in the team Classical sprint at the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympic Winter Games in South Korea.

The most decorated cross-country athlete in U.S. history, she also has an ebullient personality and wide and bright social media presence, sort of like her Alpine counterpart and fellow snow sports crossover superstar Mikaela Shiffrin, the winningest Alpine ski racer in history.

Brown knows this from firsthand experience working with Diggins in media relations at the Pyeongchang Games.

"People like her and Shiffrin … just seem to be really nice people, and they seem to enjoy what they're doing. And they're seen smiling all the time and it doesn't feel fake," he said. "I spent a lot of time with Jessie. She is what you see she is."

Meanwhile, Brown has nothing but praise for what Woodstock had done to provide a great cross-country experience of gilding on relatively level ground and slightly pitched slopes on snow, which is essentially what this wonderful sport is all about.

"The effort that they've put into preparing for those low snow seasons and washouts, I think, is their unique advantage that they've had the resources to do that," he said. "And they've had the leader in Nick, with his passion and understanding about providing that best experience."

Cross-country dispatch from the Granite State

Continuing this column's exclusive focus on cross-country, which I think is often overlooked by the ski media, here's a timely report contributed by my Waterville Valley, New Hampshire, Nordic skiing correspondent, Nick Charles:

In the White Mountains of New Hampshire, cross-country skiers are enjoying some good conditions after a slow start this season. Cross-country skiers have had the chance to glide for miles on groomed trails in the woods of northern New Hampshire almost every day in January and February despite warmer temperatures and less snowfall.

The big three of Nordic ski centers in the Granite State — Bretton Woods Nordic Center, the Jackson Ski Touring Foundation and the Waterville Valley Resort — all report lots of open terrain including some of the more difficult trails like Tripoli Road and Snow’s Mountain in Waterville.

“Judging from all the smiles the last few days, conditions are still holding up well,” Ian Cullison, Adventure Center director at Waterville Valley, aptly wrote in his daily online report last Sunday.

The question for Nordic skiers is, ‘How much longer will it last?’ Cross-country skiers depend on natural snow and the last significant snow in northern New Hampshire was the middle of January.

Only 2 to 3 inches fell in the area in the Jan. 29 storm. Without a lot of new snow, even occasional overnight dustings have been a boon in the White Mountains.

Another good thing is expert grooming, long a hallmark of the Nordic resorts in northern New Hampshire. Even with little new snow, the groomers have revived the trails by working overnights to lay down nice corduroy and tracks and stir up some powder.

The short-term forecast may be dicey for snow lovers, but February is usually prime time for cross-country skiing in New Hampshire. If you decide to go, be aware that weekends can be crowded at resorts, so it is best to start early. Check the web sites of Nordic centers before heading to New Hampshire.

—Contact Shaun Sutner by e-mail at s_sutner@yahoo.com.

This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: Cross-country areas save day with measures to preserve conditions