News 8 Eye Piece: Making Snow
Creating a winter wonderland
LA CROSSE, Wis. (WKBT) — Mount La Crosse started making snow last week and have been making it around the clock since then.
In this week’s Eye Piece, News 8 Photographer, John Schmidt takes us into the man-made snow storm.
“Well the basic ingredients in the snow here are simply air and water.”
“Water comes from a ground-fed well, which goes into our holding pond.”
“When the water comes out of the ground, it’s too warm to send up the hill, it wouldn’t turn into snow fast enough.”
“So, the sprinklers aerate the water and lower the temperature.”
“What happens is the water comes into the gun, there’s an air compressor on the gun that shoots the water out, but the fan is what really propels the water out into the air where it suspends and turns into snow,” said Dylan Bloch, a Mount La Crosse Snow Maker.
“We have six guns and numerous amounts of snow sticks, they’re called, which are just mounted and they shoot just straight water.”
“Our guns pump at 240 gallons a minute.”
“That’s what we try and keep our pressure at. In a twelve hour period it’s about two to three feet in a good night.
“Right now we’re just pushing out some of the runs, just get them roughed in so when we do decide we’re going to open, we can just do some fine tuning and groom it and it’s not going to take as long to get ready to go then,” said Erik Strangstalien, a Mount La Crosse Snow Groomer.
“The twelve hour days we’re putting in making snow and everything, it gets kind of stressful and mind numbing at the same time.”
“And, once you get done, it is a lot nicer to see the people enjoying it and using it.”
“We make a lot of snow.”
Mount La Crosse is hoping to open the weekend after Thanksgiving, but will continue to make snow until Christmas to ensure there is enough show for all of their 19 runs.
