When did Seven Springs start making snow?
Herman Dupre, one of the cofounders of Seven Springs, started experimenting with snowmaking in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He still holds patents, still works on better and improved ways to make snow. Question 4: Snowmaking’s got to cost a lot and impact the environment. It takes a lot of water, but the most expensive part of it is getting the compressed air. We use diesel fuel to power the compressor. The compressor is like a diesel bus in town. As fuel prices go up, our [snowmaking] costs go up greatly. Question 5: What if Seven Springs couldn’t make snow? We had 20 inches of natural snow [the first week of 2008]. It was of a dry, fluffy consistency — it’s all gone now. If it wasn’t for snow making, we calculated that [this season] we’d have had two days of skiing.
