Where It Never Snowed Before

Happily schussing through snow these days are a lot of skiers who have never seen the stuff falling out of the sky. It is all because of man-made snow, which is drifting down on mountain slopes far south of the Mason-Dixon line-in Tennessee and New Mexico, in North Carolina and most lately in Missouri. Deep in the Ozarks, a resort called (with some fanfare) TanTarA has a ski lodge, complete with a 1,700-ft. T-bar and four rope tows, only 175 miles from St. Louis and 160 miles from Kansas City.

Strapped Skis. Skiing, in short, is getting to be a southern sport. From balmy Los Angeles it is only 90 miles to Big Bear Lake, where Snow Summit will have more than 20,000 people schussing and slaloming next weekend. Some citizens of Phoenix, Albuquerque, and points in between will strap skis on top of their station wagons, in apparent defiance of the dry, hot desert air, and head for Ski Cloud Croft or Sierra Blanca in the Sacramento mountains north of Alamogordo, N. Mex.

Residents of Atlanta can set out for Cataloochee's five ski slopes at Waynesville, N.C., only four hours away. Ski-minded residents of Alabama and Mississippi no longer have to read about the glamorous life and peculiar excitement of skiing. Just a few miles across their northern border is the Gatlinburg Ski Resort in Tennessee, where snow machines produce a reliable twelve inches for two months of the winter season.

Citizens of Washington, D.C., who have long insisted that their summer climate is the world's hottest and their ter rain the flattest, are turning into skiers-three new ski shops have opened in downtown Washington this year. Within 80 miles of the city are: Shawneeland near Winchester, Va., which had 78 skiing days even in a winter when the natural snowfall was only half an inch; Skyline Ski Area at Washington, Va., which has three slopes, a T-bar lift and two rope tows; Oregon Ridge at Cockeysville, Md., with four tows and a 1,900-ft. double-track slope; Strudel Run at Braddock Heights, Md., with four slopes and a T-bar lift. The more avid drive four hours to the Homestead Ski Area at Hot Springs, Va., or Deep Creek Ski Area near Oakland, Md.

Chiefly responsible for providing these new horizons for Southerners is the Larchmont Engineering Co. of Lexing ton, Mass., which has perfected a snowmaking machine that combines water and compressed air in a jet to make a giant atomizer. When the resultant droplets hit the air (provided the temperature is below 30DEG), they freeze into tiny granules that make a dense powder snow. With enough piping, twelve nozzles and suitable terrain, the snowmaker can produce an 8-in.-deep ski slope 250 ft. by 1,000 ft. overnight. If greater acreage is needed, just add more pipes and more nozzles. Biggest so far is a total of 85 acres, turned out to cover slopes and trails at the Telemark Ski Area in Cable, Wis.

Something to Bank on. The cost is not trifling. Snowmaking systems start at $8,000 and range up to more than $100,000, in addition to which, an air compressor must be rented or bought outright. Even the biggest obviously do not carpet the surrounding forests with snow (nature still has to take care of that), but they can provide a wide skiable slope. And man-made snow is so economically stable a commodity (when the temperature rises, it resists melting longer than natural flake snow and can even be patched with a man-toted machine) that many a northern resort has been saved by it from incipient financial disaster brought about by the weather.

The weather is still a factor. The temperature must drop below freezing at night for the snow machines to operate. Before Larchmont installs a system, it makes months-long, on-the-spot tests of the local humidity, the direction of the prevailing winds, and the orientation of the slope itself. But after that, the predictions are something a resort can literally bank on. Says Larchmont Executive John Mathewson: "At Oregon Ridge in Maryland, we told them they would get 70 days of snow, and they operated 79 days last winter."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.