Sun Valley Snow Guns Work Overtime

Opening day on Baldy is still a good three months away, but that doesn’t mean the snow guns, and their supervisors, are taking a break. In fact, they’ve been working around the clock.

The culprit is the Castle Rock Fire and its swift move up Bald Mountain, which required the use of the snow guns to produce not snow, but water. And lots of it.

Thanks to Dennis Harper, snow gun supervisor for Sun Valley, and his crew of five, Bald Mountain is getting hosed down day in and day out. But it hasn’t been easy.

For starters, snow guns are supposed to produce snow, not water, hence the name snow gun. As a result, the guns have two lines: one that pumps a water mist and one that pumps out air. The need for water instead of mist, meant the air-line would become clogged with water, which would then run down into the compressor at the base of Bald Mountain. A flooded compressor meant no water to fight the fire and definitely no snow to ski on this winter.

To solve this problem, Harper and his crew had to physically unhook the air-lines from all 570 snow guns. Talk about intensive labor.

The next step was to figure out just how much water could be pumped out of a gun and how many guns could be used at once. The amount of water depended on the amount of pressure. In short, the snow gun crew had to create enough water pressure between 150-300 pounds per square inch in order to make just a total of 24 guns pump at once.

And last, but certainly not least, the snow gun folks had to turn off the computer software and run the guns manually. This required the crews to watch the water flow constantly and to determine when to turn the guns on and off.

We never would have guessed that water would be harder to create than snow. Thanks to the hard work of the mountain crew and the fact that there are snow guns in place, Baldy will be in good, but wet, hands.