Update: The contest is phrased differently on Facebook than on their website and I don't really know which question to try and answer because they are very very different. On Facebook it says how much snow did they make between Nov 18th and Nov 22nd a five day span. I'll try and give my two different answers at the bottom. And hope Sunday River appreciates the overall effort.
Here's my method and best guess:
Here's my method and best guess:
First off, some assumptions:
Average current base depth: 16 inches
Square Feet / acre: 43,560
Cubic Feet / Acre at current base depth: 58,080 or ~58,000
Then, the process:
I spent an hour trying to track down an archived page from either Thursday Nov 18th, Friday Nov 19th, or Saturday Nov 20th so I could get an estimate of open acres before they opened those five additional trails.
The first thing I found was the google cache of a snocountry.com report. Unfortunately, for the 18th/19th Sunday River did not supply snocountry with ANY amount of acres. They list one trail open, but don't say any acres open... This makes calculating difficult.
I spent an hour trying to track down an archived page from either Thursday Nov 18th, Friday Nov 19th, or Saturday Nov 20th so I could get an estimate of open acres before they opened those five additional trails.
But there is still hope, I found an onthesnow.co.uk report last updated this morning listing 6 open trails. The amount that Sunday River increased to from 1. And what's this? Acerage listing! 12 Acres! Jackpot. Kinda...
Then, I checked the google cache for that same page. It was dated Nov 14th. But, not to worry, they still only had T2 open that weekend. Which means the same number of acres they would have had on the 19th or morning of the 20th. Jackpot! For real! 2 acres!
Ding. Ding. Ding. A difference of 10 acres...
For a total of ~580,000 cubic feet of snow.
The real question is how much do you have to make to groom it into 16 inches of base. I don't have a great answer for this, so we'll move on and then touch on this at the very end. (Disregarding the questions of if that 16 inches is accurate, and if they have edge to edge coverage on the trails)
Snowmaking Capacity:
As a check, we need to figure out how much capacity the mountain has and how many hours were the temps within snowmaking range from the 18th to the 22nd.
The Sunday River website states... "snowmaking capacity" is 4.06 acre feet/hour (I am assuming this is cubic acre feet/hour volume and not square acre feet/hour coverage) with "production capacity" of 250 guns.
I do remember several snow reports with them stating they were running between 130 and 150 guns during the push to get up to 6 trails. Let's assume they were running ~100 of those guns on the 5 trails they were trying to open. 100 guns would be 2/5 capacity or ~ 1.6 acre feet/hour.
To check this the Sunday River website states on the early season trails they have hydrants as close as 30 feet apart. If the average trail is 120 feet wide, and they opened 10 acres of 120 foot wide trail with hydrants 30 feet apart that would require 121 guns, which is right on target with what we suspected.
Snowmaking Weather:
Next let's look at the time when they would have been able to make snow effectively. Checking www.wunderground.com's weather history for Berlin, NH which is the same latitude and elevation as the Barker Lodge. Obviously, there are different elevation and location factors at play, but I don't know enough to make any sort of educated guess. The 18th doesn't look cold enough until late in the evening for lower elevation snow making. There are cam shots of snowmaking the afternoon of the 18th, but likely upper mountain. The 19th, starting at midnight, would have been cold enough all day to make snow, likely, all the way down to the lodge. Also a tweet at 3 am on the 19th said they were going to be dropping ropes "tomorrow". Even at 1.6 acre feet per hour, they would have been able to blow enough snow to drop the ropes on those 10 acres of trails by mid day on the 19th. That means our estimate of ~580,000 cubic feet would have been possible even given the reasonably conservative parameters we used the rest of the way.
Other Factors:
There are an enormous amount of other factors to take into account to try and figure this out that could easily double the number but are almost impossible to account for. How windy was it? Early on the 19th was pretty still, but even the 0-10mph winds could account for a 10% loss pretty easily. How much snow had been made in the past on these trails? I believe Sunday Punch was open earlier in the season and probably had some residual snow before the cold weather kicked back in. How much melting/sublimating happened during the day? It was sunny several of the days and looks like it got above freezing during the midday at least at lower elevations. How much do groomers compact the manmade snow? This is one of the things I had the hardest time putting my finger on, even after thorough online research. Much less than they compact natural snow because man made, especially in warmer temperatures is pretty dense stuff. Also, presumably if you can dial up the density this is the time to do it to build a solid base. But my guess would be bare minimum they compact it 25% and likely up to 50%.
Solution:
My answer here is based on the best case scenario for least snowmaking to open those 5 trails in as short a time as possible.
Best Case Scenario (A.K.A. My Answer): 580,000 cubic feet of snow.
More Likely Scenario: ~800,000 cubic feet of snow.
Total Amount Likely Made Between the 18th and 22nd given the weather over that whole span: ~1.5 million cubic feet.
Assuming the stats about snowmaking capacity on the website are correct.
I'm pretty sure I just learned more about Sunday River, snowmaking capacities, and trail acreage than I ever thought possible. Amazing what a little motivation will do. Also, I should not I have never been to Sunday River, and recently returned to the east from Oregon, so any or all of my assumptions may be wildly inaccurate. Gotta give them credit though for a much more agressive snowmaking outlay than any other resort this fall.
