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Last fall, Crotched Mountain Ski and Ride area in Bennington, N.H., was one of only five New England ski areas open prior to Thanksgiving, and Crotched GM Felix Kagi says it is mostly fan guns that are to thank.

Traditionally, New England has been home to air/water guns, which are well suited to the region’s typically narrow and often steep trails. Fan gun installations are usually reserved for wide-open trail networks and other locations that can take advantage of the fan guns’ throw ability: base areas, terrain parks and beginner trails.

But when Peak Resorts reopened Crotched in 2003, after it had laid dormant for 14 years, the group opted to install fan guns throughout the area, as it has at all of its nine areas. And Kagi, who first installed fan guns at Paoli Peaks, Ind., more than 25 years ago and has started three ski areas from scratch, has been a firm believer in fans.

That faith is apparently well-placed. Crotched has quickly gained a reputation for having quality snow in a region that often prays for it with desperation. Kagi points to two main advantages fan guns have over air/water guns, in his view: higher snow quality, and more efficient use of energy. But it’s important to note that Crotched has as much snowmaking capacity per square foot as any area in the East, also.

The common wisdom holds that while fan guns may save energy over time, installing them is so expensive that it offsets that long-term advantage. Kagi doesn’t buy it. “We believe in fan gun technology,” he says. “I still think in the long run energy costs are not going down, so I think it’s the right technology.”

It’s certainly a technology Kagi knows well. Twenty-eight years ago, Paoli Peaks built a conventional air/water snowmaking system, but soon realized that fan technology would save more on energy and allow the area to make snow at higher temperatures. “Paoli now has a semi-automated system with over 100 fan guns,” Kagi says. “I concluded that a fan gun, if it’s elevated, can make snow when an air/water gun doesn’t even think of making snow.” He says the reason is simple: With more horsepower to the fan, the snow has more hang time to dry out. So the longer it’s exposed to the ambient air, the more time it has to form into a snow crystal.

“When you take 25 horsepower and point it into the air, I have often seen that a fan gun can make snow when a conventional gun can’t,” Kagi says. “Surprisingly, we have low humidity in New Hampshire. So it’s not uncommon that we make snow at 30 to 32 degrees if the humidity is at 50 to 60 percent.”

Bill Logan, sales and marketing manager for Snow Makers Inc. (SMI), who supplies Crotched’s guns, says two-thirds of the company’s sales are fan guns. After selling primarily fan guns since 1974, SMI added stick compressed air/water guns three years ago, because both types of guns have their niche, Logan says.

Logan agrees with Kagi that fan guns generate more snow and can make snow at a slightly higher temperature, but he notes that the temperature gap between the two is closing. “It’s about 30°F for fan guns and about 3.5 degrees below that with sticks,” he says. “That can make a big difference, especially early in the season. There are advantages (to fan guns) at higher and lower temperatures, but you can put maybe two or three sticks on the hill for the same price as a fan gun.”

Crotched’s system is easy on manpower. The area pumps 6,000 gallons of water per minute with a crew of four snowmakers. Kagi says that pumping 1,000 gallons of water per crew member is standard at Peak Resorts, even without using an automated system. “With a fixed fan system we can refresh an entire ski area with two to three inches of fresh snow overnight,” he says. “With an air/water system it’s very labor intensive.” Crotched’s website claims that it takes about 160,000 gallons of water to make one acre of snow one foot deep; at that rate, pumping 6,000 gallons of water per minute means Crotched can make roughly six inches of snow over the entire ski area in 12 hours.


Third-Party Endorsement
As host of the regional television show “Dan Egan’s Wild World of Winter,” ski entrepreneur Dan Egan has had a behind-the-scenes look at almost every ski area in New England. On a visit to Crotched with a film crew a few years ago he found conditions so superior to Crotched’s neighbors, he could scarcely believe the difference. As a former general manager of Tenney Mountain in Plymouth, N.H., for a few seasons—he oversaw the area’s re-opening in 2002—Egan can appreciate the accomplishment as both skier and manager.

“Crotched is so committed to those fan guns,” he says. “In New England, the effects of bad weather can last a week. At Crotched, they last 24 to 48 hours. It’s mind boggling how much they can cover. When you go into their pump house, it’s immaculate. There’s barely a grease spot on the floor. You ask yourself: Is it this simple? It just shows the foresight of the rebuild.”

It’s not just the ability to make snow at higher temperatures that has made Kagi a believer, but also the quality of snow fan guns produce. “Traditionally a New England area has to make what I call base snow [early in the season], which is fairly wet snow,” he says. “Then Mother Nature kicks in and everything is fine. If Mother Nature never kicks in, then you have very icy conditions.” Kagi isn’t interested in making wet snow that could become ice. Though this philosophy makes building a base more difficult, he believes higher quality snow will keep skiers and riders coming back. “To be one of five areas in New England to open a week before Thanksgiving is pretty remarkable for a ski area that is [only] 1,000 feet above sea level,” Kagi says. “The reason we were able to open that early last year was because we have an awful lot of firepower on a small amount of acreage. But we have lots of competition, so we have to offer something different.”

Egan, for one, is amazed at how easy Kagi and his troops make it look. “They know they are going to spend their budget,” he says. “They have a limited number of people running their system. They also work under the lights. They keep the lights on all night so it’s safer and easier and there’s no guessing in the dark. They see the benefit of investing money and keeping conditions up.”


Fans vs. Air/Water Systems
Still, for all the pluses he sees in fan guns, even Kagi admits that areas with conventional air/water systems would be looking at a daunting expense if they switched to fan guns. Logan points out that those resorts have already invested in a central compressor at a considerable expense.

“A lot of these guys in New England have infrastructure in place as far as air systems, and it would be costly to change over to fan guns,” Kagi says. “They would have to put in new water lines, electricity and then the guns.” Indeed, even a small area like Crotched (80 skiable acres) boasts a massive network of underground electrical wire and more than 3,000 feet of 12-inch and 8-inch pipe that connects their roughly 100 tower guns.

When deciding which guns will work best at an area, the type of terrain a resort intends to blanket is often the biggest factor. For narrow trails, an air/water gun with its more concentrated plume might be the best option, while a fan gun is usually better suited to broader, flatter areas. Stick guns are more vulnerable to wind—they can be raised or lowered, but the goal during installation is to keep them out of the wind as much as possible, and position them to take advantage of the prevailing winds. Fan guns, on the other hand, are easier to direct even in windy conditions.

There is also the fairly common option of using both technologies to attain the premium conditions every skier and rider is after. “Maybe you use a stick system up above on narrower trails and fan guns on the bottom, wider trails,” Logan says. “The resorts that do that often go with a compressor on the stick gun.” Adding a compressor to the gun, however, drives up the price. A simple stick gun with no air compressor can be had for one-sixth the cost of a fan gun. With an onboard compressor and valves to increase water flow, the cost doubles.

Yaroslav Stanchak of Mountain View Technologies questions the claim that fans operate at higher temperatures, noting that internal-mix air/water guns, especially tower guns, can operate at wet bulb temperatures equal to or even slightly higher than fans.

Stanchak points out that both air/water and fan guns have their advantages, and often recommends a mix of the types tailored to an area’s layout. “The initial construction cost of a new fan gun system and a low E tower snow gun system is approximately equivalent. The energy operating costs of each system are roughly equivalent. In terms of production, a properly designed low E system will hit maximum water flows much more rapidly than an equivalent fan system. However, a fan gun will dump more snow over a concentrated area than the low E guns,” he says.

Like compressed air guns, fan guns have their fair share of maintenance issues. Because each fan gun has a compressor, there is always the potential for something to go wrong. Kagi says Crotched has avoided that issue by using a high-quality compressor. “There is also a motor and there is some maintenance with bearings,” Kagi says. “The hoses are exposed to UV rays, and the nozzles wear out depending on water quality. If you have a lot of silt and sand in the water, that really wears out the nozzles. That’s probably the biggest maintenance issue on a fan gun. Techno Alpin combats that with a ceramic nozzle.” Another issue: blowback into a fan gun can result in an icing problem if not caught in time.

Kagi prefers using simple fan technology with as few nozzles as possible, rather than newer multi-nozzle technology. “Fan technology has two technologies, and most European guns are multi nozzle guns,” he explains. “SMI is getting back to older technology with as few nozzles as possible. They make a bigger droplet, but you overcome that with more horsepower. Multi-nozzle guns are more maintenance intensive. I would say there is considerable maintenance to a fan gun, but there is considerable maintenance to air/water guns, too.”

Even with the admitted maintenance issues, Kagi believes that for a smaller area like Crotched, fan guns make sense. “I haven’t done any calculations over the past few years on what the savings would be over conventional air systems,” he says. “But I know from the past that a fan gun is definitely more energy efficient. You have a bit higher investment cost upfront. But you do and you don’t. When we were building a new area like Crotched, I had made a calculation that with compressed air it would have been just as expensive. And in the long run, you do save.”

Another cost factor is Kagi’s preference for stationary, not mobile, guns. Only 18 of Crotched’s roughly 100 fan guns are mobile, and they are slowly converting to 100 percent stationary guns.

Logan believes the choices resorts make when it comes to snowmaking systems often boil down to geographic bias, and he doesn’t see that changing very much. “What Crotched did is unusual in New England,” he says. “New England prefers sticks [and air/water systems in general] because that’s how the industry grew up there, and in Ontario and Quebec. In any other part of the U.S., fan guns have dominated, and the industry has settled into that. Some guys in New England say, ‘I wouldn’t touch a fan gun. Those guys at Crotched are crazy.’ But you go to Utah somewhere and they might say, ‘I wouldn’t touch a stick gun.’ At Park City they can take one fan gun and supply the snow for their terrain park. They wouldn’t even think of a compressed air gun.”

While there are numerous variables and variations in snowmaking systems, there’s one particular wild-card factor at work at Crotched, according to Egan: the endlessly positive outlook of Felix Kagi. “When you ask managers of ski areas how they are doing, they are always full of negatives,” Egan reports. “They say, ‘Well, we had a rough patch of weather around Christmas and it rained.’ But Felix says, ‘The plan is working. We’re executing it. It’s been tough, but the plan is working.’ I had never heard anyone say that before.”