What’s it Like to Make Your Own Weather? | Big Q

Doug Fichera has been in the snowmaking business for 15 years—which doesn’t sound all that impressive until you consider that he’s only 23. Fichera’s family owns Black Mountain in Jackson, New Hampshire, and at the age of 8 he began helping his dad run the small historic resort’s snowmaking machinery. For the past several seasons he’s been working in Vermont, first as a member of the snowmaking team at Sugarbush Resort in Warren, and now as the assistant snowmaking manager at Mount Snow in West Dover. We caught up with Fichera at the mountain one late afternoon, shortly before he started work. I learned most stuff because people just didn’t show up, and my dad needed help. Or on Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s—the three hardest days of the year to get people to work. One of the first times I ever ran the system on Black was on a Thanksgiving. My dad and I had a quick turkey dinner and then came down and made snow. It got to be around 10:00 and my dad fell asleep; I was left in charge. So when I applied at Sugarbush when I was 18, I told them I had 10 years’ experience. They were like, ‘Get out of here, that’s not true.’ But I’ve earned my stripes. They just came at a different time.”

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“My favorite thing ever is making snow on dirt. It’s a lot more satisfying than making snow on natural snow, because you get to see your reward a lot faster. I’ve got a lot of great pictures where there was all this brown grass and then these piles of snow that weren’t there before. You’re making your own weather. You’re making your own little microclimate. It’s pretty awesome.”

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“Because I grew up working with my dad, I have a different perspective about what snowmaking costs. It requires a gazillion horsepower, and uses more electricity than the lifts do; it uses more than any of the buildings. It’s just a massive cost that every ski area needs to cover. I’ve heard people say, ‘It must be really cheap; it’s just water.’ I’m like, ‘Dude, water doesn’t go up 3,000 vertical feet on its own. You have to make it do that. That’s a lot of horsepower.’ If you’re making snow on a flat football field, yeah, it would be pretty cheap. But if you’re working with any kind of vertical drop, you’re fighting friction and gravity the whole way.”

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“The work is a never-ending battle. You’re fighting the weather. You’re fighting the wind. You’re fighting the temperature. If the temperature goes up, your snow is going to be wetter. Then your guns are going to be wet, and you have to go through each one and dry them up so you’re not making slush. If they’re pointed down the trail and the wind changes up the trail, they’re all going to get buried.” “It can also be dangerous work. Hoses blow up; things explode; things get slippery, icy, cold. Water sprays out and you get wet. You just have to stay smart and not do things when you shouldn’t be doing them. I’ve had some close calls. One time while working with another guy at Black, I was blowing ice out of the hose. I was at the hydrant, and the guy I was working with, the hose slipped out of his hand. It spun around and sprayed ice right in front of my face. If it had clocked me in the head I’d be dead. So I went out and bought a nice helmet after that.”

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“Since I’ve been doing this work, the industry has changed a lot. People used to just expect uneven trails—rocks, hazards, whatever. Not anymore. A lot of that’s been created by corporate skiing companies who want this universal product. Fast lifts. Deep snow. Million-dollar bars and condos. So now, people who come to a small mountain like the one my family owns want that. We’re making more snow now. We’re grooming more.”

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“People are always going to complain. If you make snow on busy days, a lot of times it pisses people off; it’s like a sandblast in the face. And then they complain when we’re not making enough of it. A lot of people ask why we leave the piles out for a couple of days instead of smoothing them out immediately. You need to let the water leach out. You’re dealing with a wet pile, and if you let it sit for a couple of days, you can smooth it out and it won’t turn to ice when it’s exposed to the air. You can see how warm those piles are at night. When you push them out, they’ll steam in the cold air.”

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“At Black, every snowflake counts. But opening up trails, that’s a lot of fun and satisfying. Two summers ago, we got 15 big tower guns, and I put them up. It required getting posts in the ground, bringing in cement, backfilling, and then bringing the guns up on a four-wheeler. I made it home for Christmas and ran them all. I was standing at the top, watching them all go, and my dad patted me on the back, and said, ‘Wow, it looks really good.’”