Snowmaking enhancements for winter 2011-12 at Ski Butternut

(TRAVPR.COM) USA - November 7th, 2011 - Great Barrington, MA – Ski Butternut Continues Its Quest to Bring You MORE SNOW FASTER At Ski Butternut, we know that New England winter weather can be fickle: White-out blizzards one day can be followed by a mid-season thaw the next. Ever since first experimenting with snowmaking back in the mid 1960’s, we have prided ourselves on offering some of the finest snow in the region, and we're still one of just a handful of mountains that can cover 100% of its skiable terrain--every single trail, terrain park, and even our 8 lane tubing center--with manmade snow.

So at Ski Butternut quality skiing is not entirely dependent on old man winter for snow.  For the past decade, Ski Butternut has invested over $5 million in major top-to-bottom upgrades of our snowmaking system in order to bring you "MORE SNOW FASTER" than ever before. Starting in 2000, we began replacing our old ground-based portable electrical (expensive and inefficient) snow guns with state-of-the-art highly energy efficient tower-mounted air and water guns along each trail, reaching 15-30 feet in the air.

Making snow up high helps us use less of the expensive compressed air, allowing us to make more snow using the same amount of energy. It also allows us to make snow at slightly warmer temperatures, which gives us more hours of snowmaking time. And it gives us even better control over the texture and consistency of the snow we make, which results in even better conditions for skiers and snowboarders. Then in 2007, we built a new pump house and equipped it with state-of-the-art pumps and controls that more than doubled our uphill water pumping capacity, which enables us to make more snow on more trails simultaneously (thanks to this increase, as well as the tireless efforts of our snowmaking crew, we can now make snow on 7-8 trails at once).

But in order to accommodate all that extra water, we've had to replace aging water pipe with miles and miles of new 6”, 8" and 12" pipe, which we've done in stages over the past several seasons. For the 2011-2012 season, we're proud to announce that we've completed the decade-long snowmaking infrastructure upgrade process. This fall, our snowmaking crew laid over 10,000ft of new air and water pipe, starting from our holding pond at the base, running up Cruiser, along Crosstown, up Uptown then down Downspout. And we've left room for even more upgrades in the future. Our pump house is currently equipped to pump 3600gpm of water, up from 1600gpm earlier in the decade, but it was built to accommodate a few more pumps if needed, up to a capacity of 5400gpm.

We have also added two groomers to the fleet for this winter: a Bombardier BR350, and a Bombardier BR275 specifically set up for grooming the Terrain Park. No matter which trail you choose, you can be sure that at Ski Butternut it'll be covered by a deep base of snow, groomed with care by our fleet of four Bombardier snowcats.

 Thanks to all these efforts, we make more snow faster, and we open more terrain faster, too. Despite winter's late arrival last season (2010-11), we had every trail open by Christmas (one of the first mountains in the whole northeast to do so by snowmaking power alone), and with the deep base we laid down, we stayed open into April, with nearly 100% of the terrain open every day through the last day of the season. Snowmaking that works, that is Ski Butternut.

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