Technology brings early N.H. ski season

PLYMOUTH, N.H. – Though autumn’s colors have yet to hit their full stride and temperatures continue to hover in the 60s, ski season is set to begin at New Hampshire’s Tenney Mountain.

Tenney will launch its winter ski season Wednesday, and the Oct. 1 start could mean it is the first ski resort open for the year nationwide. In the Northeast, even its biggest competitors won’t open for another few weeks.

In neighboring Maine, Sugarloaf USA’s tentative opening date isn’t until Nov. 21, according to the Ski Maine Association.

The small Tenney resort plans to pull together enough snow for limited skiing using Infinite Crystal Snowmaking, which makes snow at any temperature. Similar systems have been used in Japan for a decade, but Tenney is the first U.S. ski resort to use the system.

SnowMagic Entertainment Industries bought Tenney last year. The company holds the patent for the Infinite Crystal Snowmaking in the United States and Europe, and it wanted a place to showcase its technology.

Now it has industry professionals watching.

The process could mean longer and more reliable ski seasons, those in the business say, a gold mine in an industry so dependent on the weather.

“If you look at any business plan for a ski area, the number one threat for the business is the weather,” said Chris Bradford, editor of Snow Journal, an online ski magazine. “This is a big twist.”

Infinite Crystal Snowmaking modifies the process used in conventional snow making, which ski resorts in the United States and worldwide have employed since the 1950s.

Traditional snow making works by shooting tiny pressurized droplets of water into the air, which in cold weather then freeze and fall to the ground as snow.

But Infinite Crystal Snowmaking freezes the droplets of water before they are released in the air, making it possible to create snow at any temperature.

Tenney will open a 370-by-75-foot patch on Oct. 1. But SnowMagic’s president, Albert Bronander, has bigger plans for the technology in the future.

He hopes Instant Crystal Snowmaking will be used to bring skiing to areas where the sport has never taken hold before, such as small mountains just outside cities, mountains in the South and outdoor attractions such as city parks or baseball parks during the off-season.

He’s talking with the owner of a mountain just outside Manhattan about putting the equipment there. He has rented the machines to two mountains in France and is building an indoor skiing facility in Saudi Arabia.

“We want to bring snow to places that have never seen it before,” he said. “I truly feel that we have the ability and opportunity to enhance the industry’s hold on sports, to get more people to the mountains.”

But Infinite Crystal Snowmaking doesn’t come cheap. The machines cost between $400,000 and $1 million. And because they must constantly generate snow to replace what melts, they’re expensive to run.

To keep a 370-by-75 foot patch covered on a mild day, as Tenney does, costs about $1,000 a week.

For Tenney, the technology already is having big results. In past years, the small mountain struggled to stay open amid the White Mountains’ bigger peaks.

It was closed two winters ago, before SnowMagic bought it. But when Tenney opened a slushy slope this summer, it drew 4,000 tubers, enough to recoup the cost of installing and running the snow-making system.

By opening on Oct. 1, Tenney will almost double the length of its winter season, general manager Dan Egan said.

“The buzz in the ski world is that this is going to be an awesome thing for Tenney Mountain,” Bradford said.