Tenney Mountain opens for snow skiing this weekend

PLYMOUTH, N.H. (AP) – It’s summer, temperatures are in the 80s and thousands of people will be headed for beaches this July 4 weekend. But for the first time, they also can go snow skiing.

Using an innovative snowmaking system for the first time in this country, Tenney Mountain will offer skiing, tubing and snowboarding in the middle of summer.

Although the temperature was in the 80s Tuesday, the system was spitting out ice crystals similar to those in a snow cone, or the corn snow of spring skiing. Dan Egan, the general manager of the area, expected more than 100 kids to show up with their parents, who are summer tourists looking for new activities.

Jeff Cloutier of Lyman, Maine, staying for a week in the area with his family, saw a flier on the weekend activity and came by to check it out.

Although his kids are too small to hit the slopes, “we could come with our friends and go ourselves,” he said.

The snow cover will be modest at first, but running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, the area expects to have covered a slope 50-60 feet wide, more than 300 feet long and at least a foot deep, with jumps, rails and a tubing track within two weeks.

It will be open until Aug. 24, and then the area plans to begin again in September to cover a 2,800-foot-long slope in October with a 1,000-foot vertical drop for die-hard skiers and training for the many ski academies in northern New England.

“We’re trying to utilize a resort that normally would be vacant in the summer,” Egan said. “There are more people up here in the summer. It’s another family entertainment opportunity.”

Or the way Albert Bronander, president of SnowMagic, the Cranford, N.J., company that owns Tenney and has a patent on the equipment, put it:

“They can go water skiing in the morning and snow skiing in the afternoon.”

With more and more ski areas trying to find summer activities that expand their season, Egan said there has been interest from other ski areas in the region.

Not far up Interstate 93, General Manager Rick Kelley at Loon Mountain, one of the biggest areas in the state, called it “something worth watching.”

“Obviously, we’ll be interested in seeing how they do with it,” he said.

Bronander called it a showcase for the equipment that the company hopes to sell to other areas.

“We’ve always had a great deal of interest, but everyone wants to see the first one,” he said.

Most areas already have snowmaking equipment, but it can only make snow during the winter because the temperature typically needs to be no higher than 28 degrees. The process being used at Tenney can operate in temperatures in the 80s, though the average daily temperature of 69 in July in Plymouth is necessary to make it cost-effective.

That is one of the reasons the company bought Tenney, Bronander said.

“The technology will work in this location,” he said. “We’ve taken weather out of the equation.”

Simply put, winter snowmaking equipment shoots out water that freezes when it hits the cold air and falls as snow. The SnowMagic system freezes the water into ice crystals and then shoots it into the air.

Yoshio Hirokane, a former world class skier from Japan, came up with the idea and hired people to work out a way to do it for his company, Pist Snow Industries, in the late 1980s. By 1995, the company had it patented. Other companies in Europe have a similar process, but use a larger snowflake.

In 2000, Hirokane decided to try it in the United States and approached Bronander, and they started SnowMagic, with manufacturing plants in Raleigh, N.C., and Milwaukee.

The units range from 50 tons to 200 tons, and sell for $400,000 to more than $1 million, Bronander said.

The company has sold a few units in Europe, recently sold one in Britain and another for an indoor facility in Saudi Arabia. In Japan, it has covered a 6,000-foot trail using 23 machines.

AP-ES-07-01-03 1810EDT