A Snow Job Like No Other

If these were medieval times, Joe Affleck could awe an assemblage of peasants by waving an arm and changing the appearance of a mountain.

But this is December 2005. When the night operations manager of Mountain High West Ski Resort near Wrightwood gave the signal, five dozen snow guns thundered to life and began turning the mountain white.

Day and night, conditions permitting, Affleck and his crew of 20 make snow. What the rest of the country shovels, plows and curses, Mountain High’s workers manufacture by the hundreds of tons over 105 acres of leased land in the Angeles National Forest.

This is show time for snow time, the annual high-pressure run-up to the holiday season that can determine the year’s economic fortunes for Southern California’s ski resorts. A high-stakes balancing act of temperature, humidity, machines and intuition turns rough mountainsides into slippery slopes for skiers, snowboarders and tubers.

Skiing is an expensive sport -- a peak-time four-hour pass at Mountain High costs $53 -- and customers expect a quality experience. That starts with the snow.

Affleck’s crew has only a few days and nights to monitor the weather and coax a coordinated array of generators, compressors, colored hoses and steel nozzles to spew out the trillions of ice crystals needed to attract paying crowds up from the fair weather of the Los Angeles Basin. They started making snow over Thanksgiving weekend, then saw several warm days erase 40% of their work. Ever since, they’ve been playing catch-up. Daytime temperatures pushing 60 this week didn’t help.

“It takes all kinds to make a snow-making crew,” said Affleck, whose men earn $8 to $16 an hour. “You need to be a team player, like to work hard and solid in 12-hour shifts and deal with the demands of nature -- and machines.”

So unpredictable are the crucial windows of chilly, dry air at 8,000 feet this time of year that days off are sometimes canceled for the close-knit crews that share the occupational hazards and wintry conditions as well as snowball fights and an epidemic of chest colds.

“Snowmaking is the heart of any Southern California ski resort,” said Carter Waite, one of Affleck’s foremen. “Without a snowmaking crew, a ski resort around here has zilch.”

Making snow at ski areas began in the 1950s, when some Eastern ski manufacturers saw business slump over slight snowfalls. The process might seem as simple as turning on a faucet in the forest.

In practice, snowmaking is quite tricky and expensive and conducted largely outside public view. The idea is to use high air pressure to atomize immense quantities of water and blast it out into cold, dry air, where it turns to snow and is delicately distributed on ski runs.

It starts by building large reservoirs to hold millions of gallons of well water and runoff from last season’s snow and this year’s rains. In the first few days of snowmaking, Mountain High’s system ran through 10 million gallons.

Next, install heavy-duty generators to power the pumps and air compressors. Then install miles of piping and scores of hydrants and nozzles atop strategically placed metal towers tall enough to give the water droplets time to freeze during their few seconds of flight. A squad of weather stations on the mountain report temperature and humidity every 300 seconds to a color-coded computer screen in a ramshackle room where a clothes dryer bangs and blasts the moisture from clumps of soggy work gloves from the last shift.

The screen also shows something called the wet-bulb temperature, a measure of air temperature and moisture that tells crews whether their efforts will produce snow -- or rain. An air temperature of 30 degrees with 90% humidity makes a wet-bulb of 29, too warm and wet. But air that’s above freezing at 36 degrees with 10% moisture is a wet-bulb of 24.5, cool enough to produce snow.

Best is air around 20 and humidity of, say, 40%, which makes for a wet-bulb of about 15 degrees. Add a little breeze for wind chill and the air receiving the atomized water feels like 9 degrees, as it did the other night.

“This is great!” said Rigo Pereida, a Baldwin Park native who never touched snow in his 31 years until he started making it last winter. “Of course, I’d seen it on TV,” he added.

Pereida and Waite, his supervisor, rode the chairlift to the summit of Mountain High West above ski runs of raw dirt, runs that had accumulated several inches of slush for a frozen base and others with several feet of powder on them.

The sight is mystical with the steeply sloping mountain carved by brightly lighted ski runs hooking their way through the pine trees. Arrayed on alternating sides are batteries of snow guns. Each one spews out 100-foot arcs of moisture that emerge as water but quickly turn into brilliant white snow drifting down to coat everything in its path. The high-pressure air escaping the 60 guns roared like a jet engine at full throttle.

“This chilly air is very youthful,” said Pereida, who maintains campgrounds during the summer. “It lifts your spirits.”

Just then, the chair with Waite and Pereida approached one of those snow arcs. Quickly, they flipped up rubberized parkas and buried their faces in their chests. The wind is hurricane-force. The noisy blizzard sweeps away even full-throated shouts. The droplets, driven by pressures 25 times the average household faucet, sting exposed flesh. At full bore over a good night, one of these towers can lay down a foot of snow. With 60 guns set on average flow, the system consumes 2,000 gallons of water per minute.

The pair checked the mountaintop reservoir’s pre-cooling system, pipes that suck water from the warmer lower levels and spit it into the chilly night air, where it cools before dropping back into the reservoir. Then they inserted ear plugs and began their hourly trek down a busy run, crisscrossing the slope in cleated boots to stop at each gun.

“The most important rule of making snow,” Waite said warily, “is watch out for people.” As snowboarders flashed by, the pair took turns standing in the storm to study the flakes landing on an upraised forearm. Their experienced eyes can spot the need to turn the moisture up or down, signaling their partner with coded movements of a giant flashlight.

Checking the accumulation and winds, they determine when to turn the nozzle high overhead a few degrees to cover another area.

But first, they assaulted the steel tower with a mallet, banging several times on all sides before nimbly stepping back as a pumpkin-sized chunk of ice plummeted to the ground. From within his hood Waite mumbled something unintelligible amid the gun’s roar.

“I said,” he yelled, “you don’t want to be looking down when that baby arrives!”

After the resort closes at 10 p.m., fun-seeking snowmakers can sit on their slickers and slide from checkpoint to checkpoint. But tonight they sidestep their way down.

Because of shifting winds, one gun was “painting trees,” depositing its cargo on drooping pine boughs. It is pretty, but a waste of time and water. They turned the gun back toward the run.

An idle gun was activated to cover an area carved and dented by a day’s worth of customers. A barrel-sized snowmaker that uses a high-powered fan instead of compressed air was coated with ice and needed unclogging.

Another gun was delivering dry snow where near-slush was desired for the base of a new run. Its water was turned way up. An hour later, the run looked like a coral reef, every twig, needle and blade of grass flocked by sopping wet snow.

After 12 hours and 6 inches, the snow’s moisture would be turned down to begin producing the fine powder prized by skiers, who would be gliding over it within 24 hours, unaware of the labor involved in placing it all there.

“You want to get each run just right,” said Waite, “before moving on to another.”

Back in the office to dry out, swill some DayQuil and share several bags of peanut M&Ms;, Waite and Pereida got bad news. A generator was down, which meant the system’s air pressure was down, which meant they must soon head out again to turn off some guns. They shrugged. “When you’re working good,” Waite said, “the hours fly by.”

With the slopes closed for the night, a trio of snow-grooming machines, a nimble crossbreed of bulldozer and snowplow, growled onto the slopes. Combined, their 30 powerful headlights appeared like bright eyes arrayed around massive windshields. With highly articulated winged plows on the front, flailing metal teeth on the back and broad tracks with cleats, these quarter-million-dollar monsters don’t flinch at the steepest slopes or the deepest drifts.

Drivers Mick Buchwitz, Justin Montoya and Al Richardson spent all night in overheated comfort peering through their bulbous windows and crisscrossing the mountain. They carved the snow in layers as if shaving cheese, spreading the snow guns’ production here and there, erasing swales, erecting jumps and touching up the runs before disappearing at first light.

“We’re like nighttime sculptors,” said Montoya, an experienced groomer at 22. “Watch this. See that snow there? It’s kinda high, like a hill. So I scrape off a foot or so and put it over here where the snow is thinner. Snowmaking and grooming are skills. You either get it or you don’t. A lot of people don’t.”

Some nights Affleck surprises his cold, wet crew members with leftovers from the closed cafeteria. Fatigued at 7 a.m., they say it feels good to see their work sitting there all fresh and white right in front of them in the new day’s light.

Then they head home to sleep, leaving early skiers to think the mountain has healed itself overnight before they systematically wreck its perfected precipitation.

The pressure remains high on the mountain these days and not just in the air lines. If the snowmakers’ chest colds don’t worsen and the generators last and the compressors don’t die and the air doesn’t warm and the sky maybe helps with a little natural snow, the snowmakers of Mountain High hoped to get as many runs as possible ready for Christmas and New Year’s crowds to enjoy and take for granted.

Will Pereida be among the snow crew members taking advantage of employee discounts to hit the slopes and enjoy their own man-made snow?

“Are you kidding?” said the enthusiastic snowmaker. “I don’t know how to ski.”

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Leaving nothing to chance

Southern California ski resorts give nature a hand with snowmaking machines to keep slopes freshly coated for skiers. Compressed-air guns are often used, each spewing 100-foot arcs of moisture.

Inside a compressed-air gun

1. Compressed air and water from a reservoir are fed separately into the gun.

2. Air breaks water into droplets.

3. Droplets are spayed into cold air, forming ice crystals.

4. Ice crystals turn to snow.

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Real snow, but faster

Snow can be created in temperatures above freezing , if the humidity is low.

A snow tower can put down a foot of snow in a night.

Water pressure inside the snow gun is 25 times the pressure in an average faucet.

Source: Mountain High West Ski Resort, Times research