Took a walk up to the U-Bar to check on the progress. Impressive, to say the least. That's one huge berm they built at the bottom. They are continuing to make snow, it was several feet deep up top a week ago, can only imagine what it looks like now. Well done, Killington! You are doing yourselves, Vt, and the East proud.
Lot of complaints by some ill-informed individuals. It didn't make sense to blow snow to the base at the beginning of this recent cold snap. The ground wasn't frozen. I know: I walked down Lower Bunny a week ago. Letting the ground harden up a bit makes sense, otherwise your just wasting time and energy trying to cool the ground down. As of this morning, they started making snow on the now frozen Lower Bunny; they've since added guns most of the way down Great Northern, so top to bottom is imminent. Also, I suspect one of the reasons that they diverted more resources to the Cup Venue was simply pre-bookings. Based on what I saw in the North Ridge and the light traffic on the Access Road, they felt they didn't need the added capacity, and felt the resources were better allocated to Super Star at this time. It's a business.
As for "two completely separate snow making systems" that's either a bit of hyperbole on Killington's part, or misinterpretation of Mike and/or Jeff's original statements. I neither know nor care. Rough schematic of their system is that there are ponds, pumps, and compressors at both Snowshed and Bear (thus you could say there are two systems). Both are fed by streams, Roaring Brook on the Snowshed side, Falls Brook on the Bear side. How much they draw from them (perhaps none) I don't know. Ski areas are required to maintain minimum flow rates so that what they can draw from streams is highly variable. In addition there is a huge pipe from Woodward Reservoir about 6 miles down Rte 100 towards Okemo that feeds both ponds. Killington claims a pumping capacity of 12000 gallons/minute. I'm sure it's true. What isn't clear is where that capacity is; is it from Woodward to Killington, or up the hill? They are probably different numbers, with the ponds taking up the slack. From an engineering perspective, larger capacity up the hill would be preferred so that they can take advantage of short term cold snaps, at least until the ponds are drawn down. However, that would not represent a steady state capacity.
Snow making systems are kind of like trees: large pipes at the root to move water to various locations, smaller pipes up the individual trails. Obviously there has to be one each for water and air. To accommodate the World Cup, Killington brought in extra compressors at Bear. There are 13 there, instead of the usual 6 or 7. Last year, I don't think they added any extra compressors at Snow Shed. I don't know about this year, haven't looked. The reason this matters is because it means for the Superstar work, they are using the Bear infrastructure; for North Ridge, they are using the Snow Shed infrastructure. Thus they can honestly say they are two different systems.
Unfortunately, this isn't completely accurate either. The two systems are linked: they can move air and water from one part of the mountain to another as needed. There are pipes in the system where the direction of flow depends on how the system is configured. The reason that matters is that just because you can move 12000 gallons per minute (Killington's nominal capacity somewhere) doesn't mean you can move all of it to any one point. There are certainly bottle necks. Using the Bear side for SS means that the Killington Basin infrastructure is available for North Ridge and Snowdon. However, one of the remarkable things was that a few days ago they had 140 guns running on Superstar, way more than I'd guess to be the capacity of the pipes along the trail, unless they are pressurizing from the top (the Bear Side) and the bottom (the Snow Shed side). I don't know, I'm genuinely wondering how they managed that. Regardless, there were many guns running at the base that were certainly driven from Snow Shed.
I don't think it was Killington's intention to siphon off what was intended to be skier resources for the World Cup, clearly the abnormally warm October changed that. People making a big deal out of it are taking a very short view. Those extra compressors are going to be awesome when they finish the World Cup Venue, and start their march towards Bear.
