PALISADES TAHOE SKI RESORT — At midnight, a slender moon hangs above the snowy Sierra Nevada, casting only a faint glow on a sheer cliff and the dark canyon below.
But snowcat operator “Bandit” Ferrante has laser-guided vision, measuring snow depth 150 feet ahead and to each side to sculpt the slopes with precision. By dawn, crowds will start arriving to ski and ride the weekend’s fresh powder.
“These advancements are changing the way we do things,” said Ferrante, 36, who drives a new $400,000 German-made PistenBully rig with Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) technology to prepare the trails. “I see exactly where we’re going, and what’s going on.”
After two winters of heavy snow, the snowfall so far this winter has been sporadic. While Mother Nature is always fickle, climate change could create less reliable snow, spelling hardship for the businesses and mountain communities that depend on storms for their economic survival.
So resorts seek to make and protect each precious flake. Big corporations running Palisades, Heavenly, Northstar, Kirkwood and Mammoth Mountain have made major investments, worth many millions of dollars, in what’s dubbed “snow management.” With some daily lift tickets exceeding $250, the resorts seek to deliver a dependable high-end experience.
Initially just farm tractors on tracks, snowcats have evolved into machines of design, detailed craftsmanship and computer-driven tools.
Inside the warmth of his cab, with a chatty podcast for company, Ferrante monitors a computer screen with color-coded snow depths, guiding him on where to push and pull snow for the best coverage.
Its SNOWsat LiDAR remote sensing technology uses laser pulses to measure snow depth. With accuracy to within an inch, it can construct perfect snowboard half-pipes or World Cup ski race terrain.
The joystick that directs the 12-ton machine is smooth, responsive and comfortable to grasp. The blade shifts in 17 different directions, with wings to shovel the snow. With a sensor that detects incline, the powerful tiller automatically rises and falls when routes get steep.
It’s turned a once lonely and tedious task into a skill-driven profession.
“You keep learning new things,” said Ferrante, a South Lake Tahoe native with nearly 20 years of resort experience. A tidy tattoo — a snowcat control stick — adorns his neck.
At competitive “Groomer Games” every spring, representatives of all California ski resorts gather to test their expertise by pushing a golf ball through a maze.
Innovations in snow-making tools — such as the $40,000 Super PoleCat — perform alchemy, mixing massive drafts of water, air and electricity to cover miles of runs. Some have built-in automated weather stations.
Snowcats maximize the efficiency of snowmaking. Some are simple utility vehicles, hauling things around the mountain. Others are “trooper carriers,” moving ski patrollers. “Dig rigs” have backhoes to excavate buried equipment. A few have forks, for installing fences and seats on race days. The smallest cats are adroit at digging out chairlifts and clearing sidewalks.
“You use the right tool for the right job,” said Brendan Gibbons, director of snow surface at Palisades Tahoe.
The most prized snowcats at Palisades are the new LiDAR-equipped machines.
They are leading the fleets that are racing across the resort this weekend to groom freshly fallen powder, sending information by cell signal to the less well-equipped machines.
Until recently, snowcats relied on GPS to measure snow depth; the technology knows how high the machine is sitting above the ground. But this tool offers a limited view of what’s directly under the rig and front blade, not what lies ahead.
“It was a great start to this technology, but it only allowed us to see how deep the snow is where we’ve been, and where we are,” said Gibbons. “LIDAR shows us what the snow is before we get to it.”
LiDAR also measures the volume of piles of manmade snow, helping guide its use.
The tool is already in use in research and government agencies to study snow from the air. It helps water districts measure future water reserves. It can identify avalanche danger.
