A member of the Whiteface Mountain ski center’s snowmaking crew adjusts a line to a mobile snow gun on the Upper Skyward trail near the mountain’s summit area on Monday, Oct. 27. (Provided photo by ORDA)

WILMINGTON — Like snowflakes that fall from the sky, no ski trail is quite the same when it comes to snowmaking.

It’s easy enough to take for granted when cruising from the summit to the base over an even base of meticulously groomed, packed powder on a crisp winter’s day. Though it may feel like it at times, it’s not magic — and the reality is a bit more complicated.

“When we look at what it takes to make snow on a trail, we think about the trails that are easy to make snow on, and the trails that are hard to make snow on,” Whiteface Mountain General Manager Aaron Kellett explained.

This summer, one of the hardest trails to make snow on became a lot more manageable, thanks to the addition of permanent snowmaking guns, which replaced the need for crews to manually drag mobile snowmaking guns into place there.

The Hoyt’s High Trail, located on Lookout Mountain, isn’t hard to make snow on because of extreme weather, but rather, accessibility. It’s long, steep and far from an easy access point.

The Hoyt’s High Trail is seen in the background to the left of the Lookout Mountain Triple chairlift at the Whiteface Mountain ski area on Tuesday, Oct. 21. The trail had about 50 new high-efficiency fixed snowguns installed ahead of the 2025-26 ski season, similar to the guns seen in the foreground here on the Easy Street trail. (News photo — Chris Gaige)

“You don’t really have a vehicle that you can use,” Kellett said. “You can’t go there with a snowmobile. You can’t go there with a truck.”

The result is an especially labor-intensive process where snowmaking crews had to transport snow guns and lines up the chairlift, then drag them — by hand — down the trail. To remedy this, fixed snow guns that are drilled into the ground close to air and water source lines, which were installed in 2012. This means less time spent lugging metal up and downhill.

Wilmington is the more frequently used of the two ski trails on Lookout Mountain, and as a result, has long been fitted with the fixed snow guns. That meant it opened well before Hoyt’s, which was only able to receive robust snowmaking last season on account of a particularly cooperative winter with consistently lower temperatures that allowed snowmaking crews to branch out and not have to focus on shoring up easier terrain after thaws.

Though Hoyt’s High already had snowmaking capabilities with the water and air lines, the mobile guns were the rub.

“We know that when we want to make snow there, we have to dedicate a week,” Kellett said. “And when we dedicate that week, there’s not a lot else that we can do.”

In some previous seasons, Hoyt’s High didn’t receive any dedicated snowmaking, only opening a handful of days during the season under natural conditions.

At nearly nine-tenths of a mile and dropping about 1,400 vertical feet, Kellett believes that Hoyt’s High was the longest uninterrupted expert ski trail on the East Coast. It’s steep, narrow and technical terrain — featuring double fall lines — makes it an advanced skier’s delight, and Kellett said it was unfortunate that the trail didn’t see more ski days in a particular season, on account of how hard it was to make snow there.

“So we wanted to think outside the box,” Kellett said, “and try to make it easier for our crew, make it more efficient in a timely manner, but also make it more efficient from an environmental perspective, too.”

The new snowmaking equipment installed this summer is “substantially” more efficient than what the mountain had been previously using in those locations, according to Kellett. He said the efficiency in snowmaking, from an energy-saving standpoint, basically revolves around turning as much water into snow as the mountain can, while using as little pressurized air as possible.

In snowmaking, the energy needed to compress air typically far exceeds the cost of water pumping. This is because snowmaking not only requires a high volume of air relative to water, though the difference varies by temperature and associated weather conditions, but it also has to be compressed and highly pressurized in order to effectively shatter the water into tiny droplets in the gun to form snow as it falls through the air.

Kellett said among the advances in the new, more efficient snow guns is the ability to handle a higher water pressure. The water flowing into the gun at a higher velocity means that less highly pressurized air is needed to generate the snow. This molecular collision is what makes snow guns so deafeningly loud.

Given Hoyt’s High’s steep pitch, Kellett said the ski center only had a small window to get the guns into the ground ahead of this season. That happened to be at the very end of last season.

“We knew we couldn’t drive a truck there,” he said. “The only way we were going to get these guns here effectively is to put them on a snow cat. So, before the snow melted last year, we gathered up some guns from around the mountain, threw them on the snow cat and it has to be a winch (given the trail pitch). We winched down, I think 40-something guns, while there was still snow, and you could still drive on it. It was our only window of opportunity to do it the easy way.”

This was part of the 115 total new snow guns that were installed around the mountain this summer. Kellett said another focus was installing specially-designed fixed guns on relatively narrow trails, such as Boreen Loop, a beginner’s trail that starts near the mid-mountain lodge. The new guns are engineered to have a narrower spray, so the snow falls on the trail, not the woods. The mountain also acquired 25 new high-efficiency mobile guns that it will deploy in areas without fixed equipment.

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Water works, snowmaking

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Whiteface draws its snowmaking water from the West Branch of the Ausable River. Its water allocations are dictated by stream flow in a cooperative agreement with the state Department of Environmental Conservation so as to minimize any ecological effects on the river. There’s a flow gauge at Whiteface’s pump station used to monitor this.

The agreement stipulates that snowmaking cannot draw the river flow below 38 cubic feet per second, and when the river drops below that, all snowmaking has to cease immediately. The maximum withdrawal rate is 13.4 CFS, meaning that if the river is flowing at or above 51.4 CFS, that can be performed, with incremental decreases to the withdrawal rate when the river is flowing between 51.4 CFS and 38 CFS so as to avoid it dipping below the latter of those figures.

Kellett said that earlier this summer, the river flow had fallen into that curtailment range, but with recent rains, it has lifted back above 51.4 CFS, and the ski center is not expecting any reductions to withdrawal capacity as snowmaking season gets underway.

“As of right now, we’re looking pretty good,” he said.

Kellett said the snowmaking schedule this year is to start up high and work down, similar to the past couple of years.

“It’s worked out well for us logistically, just with our schedule for where we want to be going into Christmas,” he said. “Our snowmaking system is robust enough now to be able to handle it, because it’s a lot of guns from the top to the bottom of Whiteface.”

He said the first established route of the season will likely start at the top of Paron’s Run and the Follies, down to Excelsior and Summit Express, continuing on to Broadway and Boreen, with a line in to and out of the Bear Den beginner’s area, which is a separate, but connected, area of the mountain than the main base lodge area. This plan may be subject to change based on conditions as the snowmaking season ramps up.

Kellett said that the first line may require guests to ski in and out of Bear Den to get to the bottom, before snowmaking can be fully completed on Boreen, which descends directly to the main area. Kellett said while it may be a minor inconvenience for more intermediate and advanced skiers, it comes down to offering the best overall product for everyone as early as the season will allow.

“In the long run, we’re protecting our bread and butter of beginner skiing,” he said. “We’re planning to have something available from the beginning that also attracts more than just the intermediate and expert skiers.”