The Macker – his name well earned, starts a fire with a blowtorch. |
Macker is a tough guy. Smokes,
drinks, skis. All hard. Man
is also a perfectionist. Witness the Stockli skis he rides. (He's also open for teasing and makes fresh donuts at the mountain on weekends). He can tell you lore about the hill, but beyond that he could be seen as the master of grooming.
He once described being on the groomer at the end of the day – alone – as his
kind of meditation. (It's done with a smoke and the nice scent of diesel fumes).
So
what does he have to say about this sort of
weather? Which
others might call Liquid Sunshine, and Jay Peak has called, ahem, “transluscent
snow.”
“Right now we're having a very
strange winter. But to explain what happens when it rains and freezes goes
like this:
"Natural snow falls from the sky as a
crystallized flake. If you were to look closely at one they are pretty much
flat. As natural snow accumulates and sits, it becomes dense. When natural snow
gets warm or packed down it turns to ice rapidly. Granted it’s fun to ski in
but it takes a lot to hold up to heavy ski traffic.
"Now
I’ll give you the description of Man-Made snow. When snow comes out of a
snowgun,
the first thing that happens is a small amount of water is mixed with
compressed air to start a process called nucleation, this freezes lots of
little pellets and these pellets are forced into a larger water stream of spray
which in turn act like a pearl in an oyster. They bounce around and get bigger
and help freeze the rest of the water stream. End result SNOW. But manmade snow
is technically a frozen pellet of ice (a bit like “graupel,” jk). You need to think about
which one water will go through, a stacked-up pile of pellets, or a dense pile
of mush. This is why, when it rains on manmade snow and then freezes you are
left with frozen granular once the groomers grind it up.
"One
of the biggest complaints that you hear when a winter is like this is, ‘Oh
the slopes are icy.’ This is a statement that gets blown
out of proportion . Usually it’s hardpack they’re
having a problem with, not ice. (Now this last statement was meant
directly for me) Always
remember, just because you can come down a Black Diamond doesn’t mean you’re an
Expert Skier. An Expert Skier never complains about conditions…”
All of this means that because there's a lot of manmade snow, the conditions will actually be better. So all of you who are hoping (or even pondering) coming out to ski tomorrow, come. Because once that frozen granular has been groomed and skied on, it becomes loose granular. Think sugar.
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