Snow Plan update from Killington’s Director of Mountain Operations, Jeff Temple.

Miles and miles

What an impressive snowmaking production season so far, the low humidity levels we’ve experienced. Remember that the outside temperature adjusted for humidity gives us a number we call “wet bulb”. This means the lower the humidity the lower the wet bulb; a very good thing in the snowmaking world. Low wet bulbs resulted in 95 million gallons of water on trails since opening in October, and we are ahead of our five year average snow production numbers season to date!  Which translates into miles of trails to ski! 

More pizza

With some warmer temperatures earlier this week, we have taken advantage of setting up new trails with snow guns, making any necessary adjustments and repairs, and fed the snowmakers more pizza. With that said we charged up the system and got the crews back on the hill to take advantage of the “cold weather window” over the last couple of nights. The strategy in this production run was to re-surface and build up snow depth where needed prior to resuming the trail expansion and march across the mountain.

Fresh Tracks

As we continue to expand our terrain, the K-1 Express Gondola ride to Killington Peak will access more and more trails for the 8:00 a.m. fresh tracks experience on weekends and peak days. Moving forward, we will also open the North Ridge Triple chair at 8:00 a.m. so guests can lap the upper mountain terrain. While all other key lifts continue to open at 8:30 a.m. so the groomers can get even more “passes”.

Superstar bumps

Fun was had by all this past week with the opening of Superstar and the soft bump snow, it’s time to “light” this trail up again and put a lot more snow on it top to bottom followed by jumping off into the Needles Eye area. If you’ve noticed, there is the large barreled “fan” gun over by the top of Skye Peak Quad behind the wooden wind screen – which means Skyeburst is soon to follow on the snow plan with planned snowmaking down into Bear Mountain!

So do your chants and dances or whatever else you do to help us get more snow and cold weather headed this way, and we’ll see you on the hill!