Who made that artificial snow

Before humans conquered snowmaking, ski resorts relied on the vagaries of Old Man Winter. He was not always forthcoming. So in the dry Connecticut chill of 1949-1950, Walter Schoenknecht, the owner of the Mohawk Mountain ski resort, took matters into his own hands. “He trucked in 700 tons of ice,” recalled Arthur Hunt, a forefather of artificial snow, in a retrospective in Ski Area Management magazine. Schoenknecht subsequently “had it chopped up and spread over a single slope.” It was the first known use of fake snow on a ski slope. It also helped spark an idea. One Monday that March, Hunt’s colleague Wayne Pierce came up with a shrewder plan. He figured that a drop of water, propelled through below-freezing air, would turn into a snowflake, Hunt recalled. Along with Dave Richey, their partner in a ski factory, they slapped together a spray-gun nozzle, a 10-horsepower compressor and a garden hose into something of a D.I.Y. snow gun. They experimented with it all night. “By morning,” Hunt wrote, “we had a 20-inch pile of snow over a diameter of 20 feet.” The contraption was later used at Mohawk Mountain. Fake snow took a while to stick. Through the ’70s, the initial product, icy and blue, was considered something of a nuclear option. “It started out as a couple of bad winters here and there and, ‘Oh, my God, we have to have snowmaking in case we have another bad winter,” says Curtis Bender, a retired professor of ski-area operations at Colorado Mountain College. But by the 1980s, it was already enhancing the expansion of winter resort business. “For us it was essential right from Day 1,” says Bob Wheaton, president of Utah’s Deer Valley Resort, which opened in 1981. (The resort currently employs 40 people to make snow.) Now ski slopes sport multimillion-dollar snowmaking facilities, with arrays of $30,000 automated snow guns fed by miles-long networks of underground water and compressed-air pipes. Unlike the early guns, the nozzles are often mounted dozens of feet into the air, giving the water droplets more time to freeze as they float to the ground. Dirt particles, called nucleators, are thrown into the mix too. “You can take pure water down to minus-40 and not freeze it,” says Joe VanderKelen, president of SMI Snowmakers, one of the nation’s largest purveyors. “But if you drop a fleck of dust in it” — which helps form a hexagonal array — “it will freeze.” The technology does have its downsides. Unlike the snowflakes that kindergartners cut from construction paper, artificial snow doesn’t have lacy dendrites. As a result, individual flakes pack together more tightly — better for racing, worse for powder-skiers. One acre of snow, one foot deep, can cost up to $2,000, and it depletes water resources and devours energy. But it has also become the insurance policy that keeps ski resorts, with their sophisticated lifts and posh lodges, in business. “If you don’t have snow on the slopes,” Bender says, “you don’t have anything.” SNOWING THE SILVER SCREEN Snow Business Hollywood is a special-effects company that makes camera-ready snow. Here, Roland Hathaway, an owner, talks about his star turns. What are the advantages of using artificial snow on a film set? You can control it. Also, you’re never dealing with the cold weather. What is your artificial snow made of? Actually, we have 168 different products that we can use. Primarily, the stuff that we use the most is paper snow. How long does it last? As long as you don’t have any bad weather, it’ll hold for a few weeks. What are the major milestones in this industry? There are some pictures that we found from ’50s movie sets, where people were actually just shoveling asbestos into a fan. In the early ’80s, paper snow started to be used, and it solved all the environmental issues. Which is your proudest accomplishment? “Wonder Boys.” All the snow in that movie is all fake. Any other revenue sources? Just recently we’ve done a few weddings, some car shows and also a lot of shop windows. We’ve also done a few parties in Hollywood, which are, you know, a little on the flamboyant side.