As winter sports confront warm weather, will science save snow?
Feb. 9—On a postcard-perfect winter day, Kris Blomback, general manager at Pats Peak in Henniker, is pondering the future of snow.
It's a long-term concern as climate change warns of warmer winters, melting snowpack and whipsawing weather. In New Hampshire, where skiing is the state sport, the number of snow sports enthusiasts grows each year. Snowmaking can be a do-or-die challenge for ski resorts.
"Making snow is like a 3D chess game," said Blomback, who has been trying to keep snow on the trails for 40 years and is one of New England's snowmaking experts.
"I'll take advantage of every single window to make snow," he said. "It's always been difficult to run a ski area in a maritime environment 60 miles from the ocean," where weather morphs with the jet stream.
Like most high-volume ski areas, Pats Peak can make snow on about 80% of its terrain, delivering it through a battalion of snow guns strategically placed on the slopes.
A little more than an hour north, Dan Egan, a world-traveling extreme skier and general manager at Tenney Mountain in Plymouth, is planning to expand snowmaking and build a reservoir to capture and reuse snow melt. Tenney depends mostly on natural snow, aided by a narrow, shady trail system that was designed to hold it.
Skiing in some of the world's most remote places — including 300 miles above the Arctic Circle — Egan has witnessed glacier shrinkage, including at the highest elevations in the Andes and the Alps. What he has seen gives him pause.
Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, over time, the New England ski industry has lost, on average, seven to 10 nights of snowmaking, he said — and that impacts every ski area in the state.
"Anyone with a small snowmaking system is going to struggle," he said. "As an industry we need solutions for making snow at warmer temperatures."
Temperatures across New Hampshire have increased by an average of 3 degrees since 1901, according to a 2021 report from the University of New Hampshire Sustainability Institute.
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, between 1930 and 2007, almost 80% of the 419 weather stations across the lower 48 states experienced a decrease in the percentage of precipitation that fell as snow.
The Northeast and the Southwest are among regions losing snowpack the fastest, according to a Dartmouth College study of river basins between 1981 and 2020.
During each new stretch of warm winter days, skiers, tubers and snowboarders wonder: Can science rescue snow?
Advances in snowmaking
If making snow is a balancing act, Blomback at Pats Peak is a master performer. His variables include power costs, water availability, staffing and the calendar — which helps him visualize the 110-day ski season at Pats Peak, with its high needs before special events and school vacation weeks.
It costs about $2,000 an hour to make snow, he said, including labor, energy and maintenance. So it's imperative to maximize the impact.
"All we need is a little bit of cold air and snowmaking can take over from there," Blomback said.
The ideal air temperature is 10 to 15 degrees Fahrenheit, which typically occurs between 2 and 7 a.m., he said. Most important are temperature and humidity. Roughly speaking, twice as much snow can be made at 24 degrees as at 28 degrees, he said.
Cylinder-shaped, machine-made snow is 10 times more durable than natural snow, which is 80% lighter and quicker to melt, he said.
To make it, "You take a drop of water and shatter it into a million pieces," Blomback said, by blasting it with a high-pressure air stream or a fan blade to vaporize and scatter it. Tiny fragments turn into snow during their "hang time" in midair.
"This place we affectionately call Snow White," Blomback said, walking by the lifts and lodge to an unassuming building on the edge of a parking lot — ground zero for snowmaking.
Inside, a factory-size air compressor bought secondhand from the Packard Motor Company in Detroit takes up an entire room. Fifty years ago it muscled the high-pressure air for snowmaking.
In an adjacent area, a significantly smaller, quieter and more advanced compressor uses less energy to push more air at 100 pounds per square inch. Nearby, seven canister-style pumps send 3,800 gallons of water up the mountain each minute. Pats Peak's snowmaking plant cost more than $4 million.
"Our energy costs, adjusted for inflation, are lower by far than 30 years ago," Blomback said. "What's helped us is the technology of snowmaking. We're 90% more energy-efficient than we were years ago."
Fooling Mother Nature
About 110 miles north of Pats Peak, Bretton Woods Ski Resort is rated No. 2 in the East for snow, which comes "sometimes from Mother Nature, sometimes from snowmaking," said General Manager Chris Ellms. This allows one of New Hampshire's northernmost resorts to stay open Thanksgiving through April 15, with some exceptions.
Ellms sees no definitive evidence of a shortening ski season, though for the past four seasons, "it doesn't seem like we've been blessed by an abundance of snow." For three years, a T-bar that serves glades was closed, but that lift reopened this season. "Whether that trend continues, we don't know."
What helps ski resorts now is technology that continues to improve and evolve. In the 1980s, 1,000 cubic feet of air powered three snow guns, covering 250 feet of trail at Bretton Woods. Now the same amount of air produces man-made snow on 2,000 to 3,000 feet of trail.
"Those are the advancements that make you think we're keeping ahead of the anomalies," Ellms said.
Years ago, Ellms traveled to Walt Disney World in April to make snow for a new attraction, using liquid nitrogen in a trailer.
"You can certainly fool Mother Nature with science," he said, "but how viable and practical is it?"
Optimizing technology
Engineers are trying to improve snowmaking at higher temperatures with environmentally friendly designs that churn out more snow with less energy. At many resorts, snowmaking is a renewable system, returning water to the reservoirs that supply it when the snow melts.
At HKD Snowmakers in Natick, Mass., a major snowmaking developer and supplier, the push is on for greater efficiency and temperature resilience.
Ian Jarrett, the company's vice president, said 28 degrees is currently the upper limit for conventional high-pressure snow sticks and fan guns — which continue to improve.
Snow factories — which are essentially large, self-contained ice makers — can make snow at higher temperatures, but they're energy-intensive and very expensive to run. But at resorts in the Carolinas, Ontario and Quebec, they can jumpstart and prolong the ski season.
In warmer climates, they keep ski resorts viable. This season, a snow factory made it possible for Ski Ward in Shrewsbury, Mass., to become the first North American ski area to open this season — on Oct. 22.
"You can start that system in early November when it's in the 50s and you're able to turn a slope white," said Jarrett, who believes snow factories will be used where and when they make economic sense.
He believes the future of skiing and snowmaking will continue to depend on a strategic mix of situation-specific technology until a more efficient, affordable and temperature-resistant system is designed.
"It boils down to looking at historical temperatures and measuring what your system needs to match the climate," Jarrett said.
Relying on ingenuity
Snow storage has been used for four years at the Craftsbury Outdoor Center, a cross-country ski area in northeastern Vermont. Snow is made when it's cold enough, then banked for future use.
The man-made snow is piled into an empty former pond basin surrounded by woods, then covered with wood chips for insulation. A portion melts each summer. But it enables the area to open for college and high school ski competitions at Thanksgiving, when the snow is trucked and groomed to cover a 2-kilometer loop.
"It certainly makes it so we can have snow, even if we don't have snowmaking weather," said Hannah Dreissigacker, the center's sustainability coordinator. Snow storage is common in Scandinavia and Germany.
New Hampshire's Jackson X-C Touring Center installed snowmaking on a three-quarter-mile loop in late 2022.
"There's always been periods of lack of snow, " said Executive Director Ellen Chandler. "But the weather has become more mercurial. The seesaws are pretty dramatic right now. This year it ensured that we had skiing for Christmas week. We didn't just make snow. We made some really fun skiing."
Despite somber forecasts of climate warming, interest in snow sports keeps growing. The number of active skiers and snowboarders in the U.S. bumped from about 8.6 million in 1996-97 to roughly 11.6 million last winter.
During COVID, HKD Snowmaking fielded a flurry of requests for one of its earlier products, "Backyard Blizzard," a family-size snowmaking system hooked to a garden hose, which fills a backyard with snow.
Indoor "snow experience centers" dot Southeast Asia, with at least 34 in China, the world's leader, followed distantly by the Netherlands, with nine.
Jarrett foresees an expansion of indoor skiing, especially near metropolitan areas, including in the U.S.
Big Snow in New Jersey, visible from the Garden State side of the George Washington bridge, offers downhill skiing inside an enormous temperature-controlled arena. Although a different experience from outdoor skiing, it's very popular and "it grows the sport," Jarrett said.
Weathering ups and downs
Climate change will likely bring ups and downs — including snow droughts and deep blizzards in winter, but the ski industry has a long history of adapting to change, Jarrett said.
Ben Wilcox, general manager at Cranmore Mountain Resort in North Conway, remembers blizzards when he was growing up. But he also has pictures of a winter fishing derby in the 1940s with no snow on the ground.
No one wants to see bare spots, he said. As skiing rides the roller coasters of winter weather, "The secret sauce is just continuing to make more snow faster," he said.
Blomback grew up on Long Island in a family of diehard skiers. He made a ski hill in his backyard, using a paint compressor and a garden hose. With assistance from his engineer father, he made a rope tow out of a dishwasher motor.
"The weather is the weather, " Blomback said. When Pats Peak opened 61 years ago, snow started falling at the end of January.
Snowmaking "provides the ballast on your trails," he said. "With two to three feet of manmade base, you can ride out Mother Nature's mood swings," including a week of 50-degree weather.
When it rains, Blomback tries to look on the bright side: Rain refills the snowmaking reservoir.
"Back in the day, you were basically happy if it was slippery," said HKD's Jarrett. For skiing and snow engineering, "I think the future is going to be different. But there's a good future ahead."
