Halloween — The Situation, anyone? — or looking for the ski goggles you chucked into a corner of your closet last April.

And while the leaves haven’t even hit the ground on Colorado’s front range, the snow guns at Loveland and Arapahoe Basin fired up roughly two weeks ago in anticipation of the annual race to be the nation’s first ski area to open for the season.

The bragging rights on the runs themselves aren’t much: one, or maybe two runs, with just enough coverage to be rideable. Still, there is much prestige to the contest, and both Loveland and A-Basin require edge-to-edge coverage with at least an 18-inch base. Once they open, they plan to stay open the whole season — no closing down again after a few days of sliding.

Despite the seemingly meager pickings for skiers, it’s a contest the areas take seriously for one big reason. “We get a lot of media exposure that we wouldn’t or couldn’t afford to buy,” John Sellers, Loveland’s marketing director, told Wired.com.

A-Basin marketing manager Kimberly Trembearth agreed, citing the ski area’s small size as one hindrance to competing with big areas for consumer eyeballs. For smaller outfits like A-Basin, guerrilla marketing must suffice. Besides, she adds, the news “gets people excited and they start thinking about skiing, whether they’re local or out of state.”

In the same way that a Monday Night Football game can highlight not just the Denver Broncos but also the surrounding snowcapped Rocky Mountains, the buzz produces a measurable response from skiers and riders. “We see a pretty significant bump in web traffic and ticket sales around the start of snowmaking and opening day itself,” Sellers said.

Loveland and A-Basin are fierce rivals in this yearly ritual, despite being considerably smaller than neighboring ski areas on the I-70 corridor or in bordering states. Other occasional entrants include Maine’s Sunday River — often the first East Coast area to open.

Oregon’s Timberline, which is already open on weekends, can operate almost year-round, thank to the advantage of having part of a glacier within its ski area boundary.

But since at least 1999, no area other than Loveland (nine times) and A-Basin (twice) has opened earlier and stayed open. (In 2008, the two tied.) However, what gives them their consistent advantage isn’t size but location.

Despite sitting on opposite sides of the Continental Divide, Loveland’s base elevation of 10,800 feet is just 20 feet higher than A-Basin’s. Respectively, they’re the first- and second-highest ski areas in North America.

At that elevation, it’s mid- to late-September when overnight lows begin to consistently drop into the range when snowmaking makes sense. The magic figure? A reading of minus-28 degrees Fahrenheit on a wet-bulb thermometer, an instrument that measures a combination of ambient air temperature and humidity. For snowmaking, the lower on both counts, the better. Colder, drier air produces lighter, fluffier snow that lasts longer.

“You can theoretically make snow up to about 38 or 39 degrees Fahrenheit,” Sellers told Wired.com. “But that’s with zero-percent humidity. If it’s 32 degrees and 90 percent humidity, you can’t make snow.” And since falling snow is usually accompanied by high humidity levels, a snowstorm is, oddly enough, not a great time to blow man-made snow.

What snowmakers are looking for is a sustained overnight dip below 28 degrees. That can allow for a six-hour plus session, plenty of time to produce a sufficient amount of the white stuff. Snowmakers blow the snow in elongated piles (called whales) so that even when it warms up the next day, the snow won’t melt as fast. With ideal and consistent conditions, A-Basin could go from dry to open in just 10 days.

Both areas have to watch their water supplies, though. Arapahoe Basin has water-drawing rights only until December, and Loveland has daily limits on its draws. That man-made base has to set up the areas to take full advantage of the 350 (A-Basin) and 400 (Loveland) inches of natural snowfall they average a season.

As snowmakers get more experienced and sophisticated with their techniques, the annual first-to-open race has gotten more intense. Arapahoe Basin got into the act in 2002 by adding its first snowmaking equipment. Around the same time, Loveland began bringing in a crew of full-time snowmaking pros from New Zealand to help set its early-season base.

Unlike a lot of ski areas, neither Loveland nor A-Basin will commit to a firm opening date; “mid-October” is as close as they’ll say. No one — not even the resorts, A-Basin’s Trembearth said — knows exactly when they’ll open until as little as 24 hours before the chair lifts start turning. “You can tell we’re getting close when the guns are running throughout the day,” she said.

You might chalk that up to gamesmanship but both Sellers and Trembearth recognize that nature is always the biggest variable in the plan. Snowmaking has gotten better, while snowmakers are more sophisticated and knowledgeable. But even with the race to be first to open getting more feverish over the last decade, Loveland still has yet to beat its all-time earliest opening: September 30, 1951 – before the area had any snowmaking capability at all.

Images: Courtesy of Arapahoe Basin and Loveland

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Authors: Joe Lindsey

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