Guns and Hoses

A little update on our progress, since everyone these days is only interested in when the new snow is coming.  At Mission Ridge, we have logged 710 hours of snowmaking production since November 1, 2011. The 300hp pump in the area, which feeds 21 of our hydrants on Mimi and Tumwater and also doubles as our reservoir fill line has pumped 19 million gallons.  When we started on November, we had 18 million gallons of water in the reservoir.  We opened the mountain with Sunspot, Tumwater, Mimi and Pika Peak.  Then we nailed the face of Tumwater 3, stringing out thousands of feet of hose and portable diesel generators becasue snowmaking does not normally exist there, in order to get that run opened early.  Next we dragged the hoses and generators to Tower 14 slope and lower Toketie to open up more terrain and acres.  We built up all of Nastar from scratch as well.  This had never been done before. “It is awesome and kicked our asses", said Jon Wax, head of snowmaking.  We are now working on finishing up Lip-Lip the same way which we hope to have ready for this weekend.  That means that two runs without previous snowmaking capabilities have opened up for skiing.  Once Lip Lip is done we will be able to move to Chair 4 and start work over there.  We continue to run three guns in B.24 for volume to begin building the jumps. 

We received two demo guns from SMI:   a Puma fan gun and a Viking stick gun. The Puma can be run in manual or fully auto mode.  All of our existing guns are manual which means our crew needs to make all the water and wind adjustments according to the temperature.  The Puma, which came with a hydrant actuator, can be set up to run itself. 

The gun will make its own adjustments at the water hydrant and will adjust its valves to the nozzles via info it receives from its own onboard weather station.  The Puma works great in warmer temps and is capable of converting 130 gallons a minute into snow in cold temps.  The Viking is sled mounted for easy transportation and uses less energy to operate than our larger fan guns. 

The skiing will be fantastic with all the hard work of our snowmaking crew and equipment.  Check all our great runs out!