In 2019, the crew at Mt. Holiday began to formulate the plan for completely modernizing the snowmaking system. The vision was to elevate it to a level that could rival any of our northern Michigan ski resort compatriots; reducing the snowmaking time to get open from three weeks to three days.
We aren’t there yet, but in the summer of 2024 we took a huge leap forward and completed Phase 1 of our overhaul. A new booster station capable of moving 1600gpm at pressures exceeding 375psi was placed, and connected to more than a mile of new flow pipe, correctly sized for the capacity of water needed to achieve our vision. The pipe was connected to new high efficiency hydrants placed in more friendly locations. Upgraded transformers and more than 13,000 feet of underground snowmaking wire power new pedestals. This supplies the necessary ingredients for new snow cannons supplied to us by our friends at SMI, Inc.
We hope you had the opportunity to visit Mt Holiday this past winter season and see the results – we couldn’t be more thrilled.
But, there is still work to be done.
The Oleson, Ridge, and Peppie’s trails are waiting to receive new lighting that would match it up with the rest of the campus. When these trails are complete, Mt. Holiday will have successfully converted 100% of our property to high-efficiency high-visibility LED sport lighting.
Our retention pond needs to be reshaped so that we can store more water made ready for when the temps dip below 27F. A cooling tower had to be omitted from Phase 1 due to budgets, but the addition of one would increase our snow yields and quality.
Finally, we need to add the additional mobile snow cannons and tower guns from our plan to achieve turnkey snow conditions for early season starts.
Skiing is a short season; our goal is to make it last as long as possible. Mt. Holiday has many exciting programs and features to experience during our winter months, but none of them can happen without a base of the white stuff.
If this is something you’d like to learn more about, please reach out to snowmaking junkie Aric Armbruster aric@mtholiday.org. He’d love to chat.