Man vs Wild

The Weatherman blunders the forecast with an armor of confidence. In hopes of favorable weather, the Greeks prayed to Zeus, the Indians to Indra, and the Norse to Thor. People claim their dogs predict it without proof of their superior knowledge. Weather is the central axis of life, dictating the yield of our crops or our tennis schedule. As an avid skier, I live and die by the forecast. A huge powder day will fly me to Utah, while a drought will sentence me to the East Coast groomers. It was 1950 when man celebrated his first victory over the heavens. In New York, the Tey Manufacturing Company invented the first snow gun from a garden hose with compressed air and a paint sprayer. Twenty years later, the invention took the ski industry by storm.

As a mechanic at Big Snow, the only indoor ski resort in North America, I have become an expert on snowmaking systems. As Snow God, I am riddled with questions. After the most popular inquiry, "How do I slow the skis down?" I am asked if we use real snow. Yes, it is real snow, made in-house at a perfect 28 degrees.

Now witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational ski dome! The snow dome is weaponized with twelve snow guns, a legion of lifties, a platoon of mechanics, and a unit of snow cat groomers. Flanked on all sides, we battle Mother Nature to the bitter end. Our chillers run full bore by mid-July as our dome takes on the sun's sweltering heat. During the winter frenzy, powder-hungry customers infiltrate us, brutalizing our lifts and stress testing our queueing theories. Big Snow is in a forever war, but we reap the rewards of the ski-industrial complex.

The enemy does not sleep, and neither do we. It is imperative to keep our guard up 24 hours a day. Mechanics are scheduled from sunup to sundown, with the groomers keeping watch throughout the night. Protecting our slope requires the latest snowmaking technology. We must keep the dome cold and snow guns firing at all costs.

We bring air from the outside into an Air Handling Unit (AHU). The AHU uses a series of chambers to cool the air. First, the air is filtered to remove dust particles before proceeding to the thermal wheel. The thermal wheel utilizes cool air from the exhaust system to lower the intake air temperature before passing through the cooling cells. After the thermal wheel, the air passes through a series of chambers that progressively cool the air before it is released into the dome. After the AHU cools down the air, it is brought into the dome.  

Next, cold glycol cools the floor and the snowmaking water tank. It runs through our chillers, which use a refrigerant, R-134a, alongside cooling towers on the roof. My knowledge of R-134a and refrigeration stems from my University of Washington’s thermodynamics professor’s ramble about cycles. Something about pressure increase, heat rejection, pressure decrease, and heat absorption. I can do nothing more than mansplain this. I would encourage you to do your own research. The cooling towers work with the chiller, taking warm water heated by the refrigeration cycle and cooling it down, to be used again by the chiller. Hot water enters the top of the cooling tower and is filtered to the bottom. The process draws warm water via evaporation and pulls hot air up and out with a fan. This leaves the cool water at the bottom ready to return to the chiller.

Now we are chill and ready for snow. The snow guns use the cold water from the snowmaking tank through pressurized lines. The water and air exit the snow gun at a million miles per hour, forming little droplets. They freeze instantly and fall to the ground as snowflakes. When the snow is finished for the night, the guns go into blowdown. Air is circulated into the system to clear the lines, so they do not freeze. Now that we have snow and a cold place to keep it, we have to groom it with the snow cat so it is ready to rip!

Oh, how wonderful it is to control the weather. Humans slowly beat Mother Nature into submission. Why should she deny us skiing? It is only right that we take things into our own hands. Thank God for the progress of man.