It looks, feels and skis like snow. And, in many cases, if people weren't told it was shot from gun, they would certainly believe it fell naturally.
Where early man-made snow was of a similar quality to ice cubes, today's snowmaking technology is nearly as perfect as Mother Nature's.And, where it used to be that natural snow was good enough, in today's skier-directed winter market, it's not.
As Robbie Beck-McHugh, vice president of marketing at Park City, points out:
"People want to start skiing around Thanksgiving and they want to stop sometime after Easter . . . and you for that you need snow."
This year Park City, Alta, Snowbird, Solitude, Brighton, ParkWest and Deer Valley all made or are making snow. Some own a few snow guns, some have many. Some can make a little snow, some make tons.
Park City has the most developed system in Utah. It consists of 2,000 hydrants, 160 snow guns, 8 miles of hose and more than 100 miles of underground pipe. It can cover more than 400 acres of skiable terrain and can make snow on runs serviced by nine of its 14 lifts.
According to Beck-McHugh, more than 11,000 man-hours of work went into snowmaking between Oct. 18, the day the resort started making snow, and Christmas.
The snow produced from all these hoses, pipes and guns is as close to natural as snow can get. The best part is it can be put down on command.
The minute temperatures get low enough, snowmaking can commence.
At the heart of Park City's snowmaking is a state-of-the-art feature called a cooling tower. One of the laws of snowmaking is that the colder the water the better the snow.
Park City has an almost inexhaustible supply of water in its old, abandoned mine shafts on site. Snow melts and eventually seeps into the shafts. The ski area pumps the water from the shafts and stores it in ponds.
The problem, explains Phil Jones, president of the Park City ski area, is the water comes out of the mine shafts at a temperature not conducive to making good snow.
The water in the shafts is between 51 and 52 degrees. For every one degree above freezing the water is, experts say, a snowmaking system loses two percent efficiency.
"Under that formula, we were losing 32 percent efficiency in our snowmaking because of the water temperature," says Jones.
Now, water from the ponds is pulled into a manifold on top of the two-story cooling tower. Upside-down sprinklers then spray the water onto a honeycomb mesh that breaks it into drops. These drops then fall over a series of splash bars that break the drops into finer droplets. Large fans, with three-foot blades, then cool the water to near freezing.
The tower can cool about 3,000 gallons of water per minute.
This done, the area can then begin making snow.
Park City first tried making snow following the drought of 1976-77. Early technology simply meant spraying water into the cold, night air. The results were something close to ice. Skis wouldn't hold on it and skiers were often afraid to venture onto it.
Later it was discovered that a mixture of air and water produced something closer to actual snow.
Between the cooling tower, air and water, and the ability to adjust each, the light, fluffy snow Utah has become known for was duplicated.
"Actually," says Beck-McHugh, "most skiers haven't even realized that what they've been skiing on has been man-made snow . . . it's that good."