Saturday, December 24, 2011

Spreading it...

The French have a saying that I love: “La culture, c'est comme la confiture, le moins on en a, le plus on l’étend.” This means that “culture is like jam; the less you've got, the more you spread it.” Okay, we can extend that comparison to snow making. There are three ski mountains in Park City. The best one, every one will agree, including the readers of Ski Magazine, is Deer Valley. The number one ski resort in North America makes lots of snow and doesn't spread it around too much. It lays it very thick and that makes all the difference.

Its next door neighbor, Park City, does a real good job too. Huge snow production and thick cover. Then, there's Canyons that doesn't have the chance of having access to much water and lacks the impressive infrastructure of its neighboring competitors. Whatever snow is made there is spread as much as possible and since snow cats do the best they can, it's hard for them not to churn the ground below and imbed all these pebbles that are trademark of skiing Canyons. That's right, when you don't that much snow to work with, you've got to spread it!

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