Thank God for snow-making!

This snow season is off to a slow start with many snowfalls, but to date, all without much accumulation. If there was no artificial snow-making, this would be a challenging start for skiing as Christmas is just one week away. 

In the forty winters I have lived in Park City, I’ve even seen worse seasons than this one, and must admit that we’ve been extremely lucky to have cold enough weather since November to complement the lack of natural snow with man-made alternative! 

Still, making snow like this is not new, as the first documented attempts at artificial snow-making goes back to 1934 when Warner Bros. invents the first snow-making machine in Hollywood to create a blizzard for a film. The machine used three blades to shave ice from a block and a fan to blow the ice particles into the air. 

But the real breakthrough came in the 1940s when Ray Ringer, a Canadian researcher, accidentally discovers snow-making principles while studying ice formation on jet engines. 

Yet it’s in the 1950s when Art Hunt, Dave Richey, and Wayne Pierce invent the first commercial snow cannon and in 1952, the Grossinger's Catskill Resort Hotel not too far from New York City, became the first to use artificial snow.

By the end of that decade, in 1958, the "Eastern Ski Directory" notes that 18 of the 104 ski resorts in New York and New England are using man-made snow to complement mother nature’s work. From that point forward, Alden Hanson, the chief scientist for Dow Chemical, and a prolific inventor, patented the initial fan-type snow gun in 1961 (he also invented Lange ski boots’ Flo padding material, Hanson’s silly-putty and of course the first rear entry boot known under that name). 

This led the way to more significant advancements into the 1970s and the development of more efficient snow-making machines that we’ll talk about in the next blog… (to be continued)