Snowshoe Mountain Resort

Speaker 1:           Okay. One of the most important things when it comes to the mountain of any ski resort, is this man. Why? Because Ty is in charge of all the snow making. How are you buddy?

Ty:                          Doin’ good. Doin’ good.

Speaker 1:           All right now, I just said that it’s one of the most important roles on a mountain. You have just invested over $4 million in extra snow making.

Ty:                          Right.

Speaker 1:           Not get rid of the old ones and put these in to replace.

Ty:                          Right.

Speaker 1:           Why was that such an important, vital part of [Sosio 00:00:33] Mountain?

Ty:                          Snow making has changed over the last couple of years immensely as far as technology in the guns.

Speaker 1:           You were talking a little bit about the snow making guns and how that’s changed your operation.

Ty:                          Yeah, it’s changed the way that we move across the mountain, the way that we open trails, because most of the guns that we added this year are stationary guns, which means we can’t move ’em. They will take care of 100 to 200 yards of trail, but that’s all they’ll care of, we can’t move ’em anywhere else.

Speaker 1:           Yeah.

Ty:                          It’s changed the game a little bit. Makes for a better surface for skiing on, especially if we have a thaw then a freeze. We got hard conditions where we can turn on these guns, they’re fully automated. You don’t even have to have a person there. They come on and make snow to the temperature that it is.

Speaker 1:           That’s what we love. Now, I wanna talk a little bit about all the water reserves that you have here, down towards the boathouse. How much water is there?

Ty:                          The lake is 125 million gallons.

Speaker 1:           Yeah.

Ty:                          It’s about a 40 acre lake. We actually pump close to 400 million gallons a year. So what happens is, we’ll pump water out of the lake, we never empty the lake ’cause it’s always got water coming into it. But when we get a thaw, all that water goes back to the lake.

Speaker 1:           Right.

Ty:                          We pump it back up on the hill again and make snow with it.

Speaker 1:           Okay. Anything new that might be happening in the summer that we don’t know about? More guns?

Ty:                          Not yet. I don’t know yet. Possibly, but I don’t know yet.

Speaker 1:           What is it that you actually do here in the summer?

Ty:                          We do a lot of maintenance to the snow making system. We have 43 miles of pipeline on the mountain, half air, half water. A lot of it’s 30 years old, so it’s starting to fail, so we dig up close to a mile a year …

Speaker 1:           Wow.

Ty:                          And replace it.

Speaker 1:           Just to replace it?

Ty:                          Yep.

Speaker 1:           Ty, good luck man.

Ty:                          Thank you.

Speaker 1:           Appreciate you and all your great work.

Ty:                          Thank you very much.

Speaker 1:           For all us fabulous skiers.

Ty:                          Yep, that’s what we’re here for.