Quote:
Originally Posted by snoseek  I Think I remember Saddleback using fan guns back in the 80's.
Can anyone tell me what the final product is like compared to traditional snow guns? better, worse, similar? |
Here's what my take this season was. First off, the area I grew up skiing primarily in the 80's, West Mountain in Queensbury, NY, was an "old school" fan gun mountain. They had the big old, noisy sled mounted Hedco fan guns whose product just about always was closer to ice than snow, especially before it was machine groomed MANY times.
Now fast forward until the current time. I'm a decade plus Mount Snow skier, and a have a ski house there, and on average, unless there's a newborn kid in my household, have skied there atleast 30 days a season for roughly the last decade. Mount Snow's air/water prduct that they make is very good, and that doesn't matter whether it's from some of the "older" ground based guns with ALOT of nozzle holes in them that they tend to use for base building condtions, or the newer air/water tower guns that tend to make a dryer snow.
When I heard about a year ago of Peak's 1st big fan gun purchase, I will admit to having some mixed feelings. The data of a higher conversion rate of water to snow appealed to me, especially given Mount Snow's current limited water supply, but I did have some flashbacks to the less than stellar product I grew up on in the 80's.
Then came this past November and my 1st experience with Mount Snow's "new technology" SMI fan guns. First off their noise level is very quiet, maybe 25% of the noise level of an air/water gun, to the point where you can actually stand right under one of towers that most of them are on while they're running and have a conversation at normal speech levels with someone! 2nd they make a much lighter, drier snow than most air water guns at most temperatures, and the fresh fan product actually skis like fresh powdery natural as opposed to the "styrofoamy" like texture that air/water guns put out the majority of the time. 3rd, the fans can through the snow a long way. Mount Snow had them this year on many wide trails, and even before the cats started pushing snow away from the fan guns towards the other side of the trails, the width of the skiing surface was close to twice as wide as on trails that didn't have fan guns this season(and that includes the trails that had air/water towers too). Lastly, the quantity of snow they produce. Plain and simple, on nights when they had fan guns going on some trails and air/water on others, the next AM it was clearly visible how much larger the piles from the fan guns were than from the air/water guns.
Bottom line, modern fan guns aren't anything like the fan guns of the 80's. They make a superior product to just about any air/water gun, and they do it more efficiently. If it wasn't for their $20,000 or so a piece price tag, I bet you'd see them in alot heavier use all across ski country.