Resort Owners Seek Pipeline to Make Snow : Antelope Valley: The Mountain High ski area bought wells outside Palmdale two years ago, but it needs county OK to build a conduit to Wrightwood.

Amid growing official campaigns to save water during the drought, owners of a ski area near Wrightwood are proposing pumping water to the mountain resort from southern Antelope Valley wells to turn into man-made snow.

The Mountain High ski area wants to draw water from its own wells, which it bought about two years ago in Los Angeles County territory southeast of Palmdale.

But the company needs county permission to build a four-mile pipeline to carry the water from the desert wells to the ski slopes in the San Gabriel mountains to the south. Now, the company must truck the water from the wells to its snow machines, but it could afford to carry twice as much in a pipeline.

Access to water from the desert wells, originally purchased as a backup resource, became more urgent after it was discovered that the February, 1990, Upland earthquake triggered changes in the geologic formations under the resort. Overnight, water production from the resort’s mountain wells dropped from 120 gallons per minute to 10, said Stephen Cramer, chief executive officer of Mountain High.

The request is the kind of routine matter that probably would have sailed through the county government a year ago.

But the proposal didn’t make it to the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors until Tuesday. The timing was unfortunate for the ski resort because the supervisors spent the previous weeks consumed by public debate over drought issues--water rationing, recycling gray water and the sinking of ground in the Antelope Valley because of overpumping of ground water.

At the request of county Public Works Department officials, who had previously given the proposal a tentative approval, the supervisors Tuesday delayed a vote for at least two weeks. They said they want to further analyze how the pumping plan might affect the region’s water supplies and whether skiing is an appropriate use of water in a drought.

“Folks in this department look at pipeline requests all the time, but they’re not used to looking at the big picture,” said Roger Burger, assistant director of public works. “Now that we’re in a drought, is this something we really want to do?”

Mountain High wants to build a $2-million pipeline that would run along 233rd Street East from Pearblossom Highway to the base of the mountains, up a nearby canyon and then along U.S. Forest Service roads to the ski resort.

Cramer said the pipeline would carry up to 100 million gallons of water a year for snow-making, twice as much as was trucked up the mountain from the desert wells this season.

Water officials said 100 million gallons would be enough to meet the water needs of about 300 families for a year.

But, according to Cramer, at least 75% of the water would end up back in the Antelope Valley in the spring, when the manufactured snow melts and runs downhill, sinking into the desert soil.

County officials said they want proof that the snow runoff would flow toward the Antelope Valley and, even if it headed in that direction, that it would replenish the underground water table that supplies wells.

The ski resort’s request came as an unwelcome surprise to the city of Palmdale and the Palmdale Water District.

“There is a concern when any large amount of water is taken away,” said Doug Dykhouse, Palmdale’s deputy director of public works.

Hal Fones, the manager of the local water district, said the district had opposed a previous proposal by Mountain High to use water from Little Rock Creek.

But, even though the well will draw from the same water table that supplies the city and the water district, neither Palmdale authority has any official say in whether the pipeline is built because Mountain High’s wells and all of the proposed pipeline lie outside the city and water district boundaries.

The State Water Resources Control Board has some control over water use in such areas, but State Water Engineer Terry Snyder said his office is primarily concerned with ensuring that no rivers are impacted.

Use of well water “is kind of a God-given right,” Snyder said.

In fact, Mountain High only has to subject itself to county review because the pipeline would follow and cross county roads. The ski resort does, however, also need permission from the U.S. Forest Service to run the pipeline through Angeles National Forest.

Cramer said many of the local agencies’ concerns, including questions about water use, will be addressed by the environmental assessment required when the company applies to the Forest Service.

As part of preparations for that environmental report, the company monitored water levels in other wells near its desert wells this winter. Despite pumping 50 million gallons of water, the level of the surrounding wells did not drop, Cramer said, indicating that the ski resort is not removing more water than is replaced naturally.