Name: How Ski Resorts Store Snow Over the Summer
Uploaded: 2024-10-09T21:01:20.000Z
Duration: 8 min 8 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Snow, famous for melting in summer, but does it have to?

Adverbs of degree

According to the snow storage industry, no, no it doesn't, for, with the help of technology, cash, and willpower, we humans have figured out how to store mountains worth of snow outside, through the summer, even when it's over 100 degrees out, or 40 degrees Celsius.

So rich people can slide around on a predictable schedule, of course, which, to be clear, is not how I would describe my beloved sport of skiing, but unfortunately researching this topic has deepened the anti-skiing sentiment among my writers, and I'm too busy to edit them down.

So with that in mind, let's talk about snow storage, aka, the complex, expensive, apocalyptic logistics abetting mother nature and the precious changing of her seasons to ski resorts' wretched, self-destructive will.

You might already know that many ski resorts use artificial snow.

That, after all, is how they pulled off the 2022 Winter Olympics, and how some regular shmegular ski resorts stay open during periods of light snowfall.

It's also how ski resorts survive in places like Alabama, or Lesotho, or Oregon, in July.

Enough money and manpower to produce, spread, pack, smooth out, shape, reshape, and build sick jumps out of enough fake snow to cover all your space.

Which, for that resort in Alabama, assuming just a 4-inch layer across their 9-acre skiable surface, is going to mean 130,680 cubic feet of fake snow, roughly enough to fill the Titanic, though only about a 588th the volume of the iceberg that sank it.

Most of this faux snow is made by snow guns, which shoot water droplets into the air, where they freeze and attract moisture in the atmosphere to form lovely little snow crystals.

A company called TechnoAlpen supplies 60% of the world's snow guns, including all the ones used at the 2022 Olympics, and a single one can cost about $50,000, to say nothing of the maintenance, energy, and water costs it brings.

Actually, let's save a little bit, because one of TechnoAlpen's top snow guns uses 23 kilowatts of energy per hour, meaning that in 10 hours, one snow gun will use as much energy as, according to Con Ed, my writer's household used in the entire month of July.

At maximum efficiency, which is to say in unwindy, dry conditions with a temperature between negative 4 and positive 5 degrees Fahrenheit, or a negative 20 to negative 15 degrees energy drink, a snow gun can turn 20 cubic meters of water into about 35 to 40 cubic meters of snow an hour—meaning the gun we're describing would have to run for over four straight days to cover that Alabama resort ski service, using about as much water as the average Alabama resident does in four weeks in the process.

But snow guns get less efficient the warmer the temperature gets.

All those numbers assume max efficiency, but if it's 28 degrees Fahrenheit, just a bit below freezing, it takes that same machine 10 times as long to make the same amount of snow, if not a bit less—above freezing, it won't work at all.

Think about it this way—snow guns do their best supplementing snowfall in cold, wintry environments on days where it doesn't happen to be snowing.

In a naturally warmer place, or season, or place that's getting warmer year-round because of climate change, they're an imperfect solution.

If only, you might be thinking, I could keep some summer snow stockpiles so that if my snow guns flop in October I could still start ski season—ski-zin—on the day I decide, the day for which I've already sold hotel rooms, the day rich people wish to slide!

Well congratulations, hypothetical resort-owning HI viewer, that's exactly the system some resorts have developed.

Levy, a ski resort in Finland, stores 260,000 cubic meters of snow across four of their nine total stockpiles, guaranteeing they can open at least a couple of routes by November every year.

That's when they host the FIS Alpine Ski World Cup, one of several autumnal ski events that climate change risks wiping off the calendar by not providing enough snowfall by the time they roll around.

Since they started storing snow in 2016, Levy hasn't had to cancel the World Cup once, unlike the first 11 men's races of FIS's 2023-2024 season, all of which were cancelled at other resorts.

Their stockpile is about 30-40% natural snow, all the rest is artificial, and gets made during the coldest months of the year when the snow guns are at peak efficiency.

In Davos, Switzerland, for example, they produce tons of snow in December and January, then store it away until it's time to lay out their cross-country track that opens in October.

The key to effective snow storage is both super obvious and super unintuitive—covering it up with a big blanket.

Of course, snow exposed to the summer sun will melt, so covering it up must help.

But at the same time, when I'm trying to stay cool in the summer, I don't exactly bundle up in a big blankie.

But these aren't just any big blankies—they're made of special textiles that reflect sunlight on the mountain away from the snow, meaning the sun's heat doesn't get absorbed into the snow and melt it, and they're usually less than a centimeter thick.

The surface of the blankets is water-repellent, meaning the blankets don't absorb much of anything that could in turn absorb heat and melt the snow.

Underneath the blankets, the snow is insulated from the outside world and stays below 36 degrees Fahrenheit, 2 degrees other, even when it's over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, 40 degrees boring, outside.

As you can imagine, these blankets are massive, and putting them out is an ordeal.

The Perseida Glacier, in Italy, gets covered in 10,000 sheets of geotextile, laid out by a crew of 11 people using two snowcats and a lot of rope, harnesses, and crampons.

The sheets get weighed down on the edges with sandbags and pegs, and sewn together with handheld sewing machines, though at other resorts they just get taped.

The whole process—the laying, the sewing, all of it—takes a total of six weeks in good weather, and three months in bad.

And like everything in Ski World, it's expensive.

Of course there's the months of labor, the fuel in the snowcats, and what I have to assume is miles of thread in the sewing machines, plus about 1,000 backup sewing machines because if there's one thing handheld sewing machines are going to do, it's break if you look at them the wrong way.

And I can't really estimate the cost of that for you very well, but I can tell you that a blanket from Snowsecure, one of the leading suppliers of this kind of thing, will cost you several hundred thousand euros.

And who's to say how long-term of an investment that is, because blankets like these have to live outside in the elements, where they eventually get dirty and might start to tear, which is more than an aesthetic issue.

Heat can get in through a tear, or it can be absorbed into dirt that's caked into the textile.

One article I read said that resorts had to replace their blankets every couple of seasons, though plenty of lip service—maybe some actual work, I don't know—is being paid to the idea of making more durable blankets and more eco-friendly fuel sources to run those snowcats on.

But how well does this whole system really work?

One study of snow farming resorts found an average of 72% of the stockpiled snow survived over the summer.

That's more than enough to get a resort going in the fall.

So forget the mind-boggling amount of water and energy it takes to do this.

Forget that all that water and energy contributes to the climate change that's causing the problem in the first place.

Forget that, in many ways, a meter-thick pile of wood chips and sawdust insulates a pile of snow about as well as one of those fancy-schmancy blankets.

We the people of the international ski community have defeated the sun and will ski wherever we please.

We will spit in the face of God if it gets us up and down a mountain faster.

Whoa, hold on, scratch that, I didn't say-

Oh, I've gotta start editing these scripts before I read them.

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