Jerry Jones remembers clearly the year that he and other ski executives became brilliant. It was 1976, and Jones had endorsed installation of Colorado’s most extensive snowÐmaking system at Keystone, a resort that Colorado skiers derisively called Key Rock because of its frequently patchy snow cover.

Few Colorado ski areas used machine-made snow then. Snowmaking was expensive, and to resort to it was to acknowledge problems of natural endowment. Setting aside those concerns, Keystone installed snowmaking equipment. The move was impeccably timed. That autumn it didn’t snow in Colorado, at least not much. Christmas passed with only a few inches. Vail started a soup line for unemployed workers, and Steamboat closed for a month. Skier days at some resorts plunged nearly 100 percent; Keystone chalked up 45 percent growth.

“Everybody thought we were gen-iuses because we put in the biggest snowmaking expansion ever the summer before,” Jones says. “The real reason was that Keystone was consistently short on snow, and we needed snowmaking to supplement the natural snow, especially in heavy traffic areas.”

It took another drought winter to convince those who missed the lesson the first time, but now all but three of Colorado’s twenty-six ski areas make artificial snow. Each year, snowmaking equipment is brought within the reach of more slopes. Keystone leads the Colorado resorts with 52 percent of its terrain covered. And its managers have plans to expand snowmaking even further.

In New England, where a single midwinter rainstorm can shrink a snowpack like plastic wrap in a microwave, some ski areas have nearly 100 percent coverage. Ditto for midÐwestern and southeastern resorts. In California, where snowfalls are reported in feet, not inches, snowmaking is almost universal, allowing Mammoth Mountain and the Tahoe-area resorts to guarantee a white Thanksgiving. Even Utah’s Alta, which averages 500-some inches a year and has attained a near mythical status among knowledgeable skiers, makes snow. In short, snowmaking has become almost as essential to the ski industry as ski lifts. They call it insurance, and for ski areas, it’s an attempt to divorce their financial fate from whims of weather.

But snowmaking has become increasingly controversial, for a variety of reasons. For one, snowmaking requires loads of energy. The Aspen Skiing Company, for example, uses enough coal, which it burns to generate electricity, to spew 6,909 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Alternative power sources can be just as bad. The diesel-powered snowmaking machines at Killington ski area are the eighth-largest source of air pollution in Vermont. Also, snowmaking drains water from fragile mountain streams during times when they typically experience their lowest annual flows. Taking water out of those streams can endanger fish and the smaller aquatic organisms that fish depend on. “Winter is typically the most stressful period [for] these organisms,” says Kenneth Kimball, director of research for the Appalachian Mountain Club.

The effects are exacerbated because ski areas tend to be located near the headwaters of streams, where flows are modest. And in Colorado, where more than 20 percent of the nation’s skiing takes place, some resorts draw their snowmaking water from streams tainted by mining pollution, spreading heavy metals into previously untainted watersheds.

Yet ski resort managers are scrambling to expand their snowmaking capabilities. Environmentalists say the U.S. Forest Service has been too quick to allow ski resorts to expand snowmaking, especially given that national consumer demand for downhill skiing is flat. Roughly two-thirds of all skiing in the United States takes place on national forests. “We’re saying, ‘Wait a minute—you have all these impacts from snowmaking and what do we get in return?’” says Rocky Smith of the environmental group Colorado Wild. “A few stockholders in the big companies get even richer.”

The first account of snowmaking dates from 1950, when a trio of engineers in Connecticut used a garden hose, a small compressor, and a spray-gun nozzle to create a twenty-foot-wide, twenty-inch-deep strip of “snow.” The feat garnered press, and was soon followed by a patent. More technological tweaking was needed for the practice to be useful on landscape-altering scales, though. That came in the 1960s in New England. Western ski areas followed the eastern example a decade later.

In Colorado, resorts closest to Denver eventually decided to use the snowmaking technology to open their gates early for eager-beaver skiers. That, in turn, meant more customers for restaurants, clothing stores and real estate offices that are increasingly controlled by the ski companies. “You only make money when you’re open,” says Bob Kunkel, chief operating officer at Durango Mountain Resort (a.k.a. Purgatory), in southwestern Colorado.

By opening in November or even October, resorts also prime the pump for winter business. The race to open first has developed into an annual contest, attracting media attention that amounts to free publicity for the industry. That publicity plays an important role in the effort to attract reservations for Christmas, which is the single most important week for every ski town.

In Colorado, the strongest competition for first-day bragging rights typically is waged between Keystone and Loveland Basin resorts, which abut the Continental Divide near Interstate 70. Vermont’s Killington sometimes beats them to it, offering tantalizing images of a white ski run amid fiery autumn colors that play well in the Boston media.

Snowmaking has become a key element in local economies, the effect of which extends far beyond the ski areas. The slopes may be the prime attraction for vacationers, but they’re not where people spend most of their money. At Vail, for example, the ski area estimates it received only 25 percent of the money that skiers spent on a typical vacation. That ignores real estate sales, perhaps the largest bonanza of recent years.

“Restaurants, hotels, recreationalists and businesses depend on open ski areas for their income,” explains Auden Shendler, director of environmental affairs for the Aspen Skiing Company. “So if we don’t make snow, they want to know why. We’re under tremendous pressure to make snow early.”

Given that pressure-—and given the intensifying competition among ski areas for a share of the high-end recreation dollar—ski resort owners are laying plans to slather their slopes with even more machine-made snow. Nowhere is this pressure to expand snowmaking capacities more intense than in Colorado.

Ground zero in the battle over snowmaking lies along the headwaters of Colorado’s Snake River, which flows westward from the crest of the Rockies in the White River National Forest. The Arapahoe Basin ski area sits at the head of the river, boasting North America’s highest lift-accessed slopes at 13,050 feet. “A funky little place,” as Smith says, it is popular with locals who favor skiing as it was forty years ago, when a chairlift topped the list of amenities. Although A-Basin, as it is known, has Colorado’s longest ski season, most years remaining open through the Fourth of July, it is one of the three Colorado ski areas that lacks snowmaking equipment. A-Basin aims to change that. By adding snowmaking equipment, managers hope to open by early October and to stay open through August, perhaps even year-round.

To make the snow, the ski area’s managers plan to suck water from the north fork of the Snake River. In 1999, the Forest Service approved the plan. Environmentalists fret most about how that diversion of water will affect the river, and the creatures that live in it, several miles downstream. That’s because Keystone Resort already draws water from the Snake for its snowmaking operations—at times as much as half of the river’s natural flow. At the point where Keystone takes its water, the Snake is tainted by high levels of cadmium, copper and zinc from defunct mines.

Keystone managers use that water to make artificial snow that they spread onto nearly 1,000 acres of terrain within the ski area, including a portion of the Camp Creek watershed. Federal regulators have found high levels of heavy metals in the once pristine watershed, and they pinpoint the machine-made snow as the culprit. Smith’s group, Colorado Wild, contends that if uncontaminated water is removed from the north fork of the Snake River to make snow at A-Basin, the pollution downstream, where Keystone removes water for snow-making, will be even more concentrated. The group has sued the Forest Service, saying that it shouldn’t have approved the A-Basin plans.

The case is being watched closely. The owners of A-Basin say that if Colorado Wild prevails, the suit could mean that upstream water users everywhere are at least in part responsible for water quality issues far downstream. And it’s not fair, they say, that A-Basin’s right to use its water has been compromised by the miners who left the mess behind a century ago.

They point out that they have agreed to a number of mitigation measures, such as developing new wetland habitat and limiting how much water can be diverted during periods of low natural flows. Nonetheless, the Forest Service and A-Basin’s owners acknowledge that the plan would increase heavy metal concentrations downstream. Environmentalists say they are simply trying to make sure that the already bad pollution problem on the Snake isn’t made worse. (Just before Forest Magazine went to press, a federal judge ruled in favor of A-Basin.)

Meanwhile, many other ski areas in Colorado and across the country are laying plans to expand their snowmaking operations. At Vail, company officials want to more than double their snowmaking capabilities to cover nearly 780 acres. They would do so by building a reservoir large enough to store 120 million gallons of water. Most environmentalists concede the benefits of storage. Storing water during spring runoff allows the water to be used late in the year. Streamflows are reduced less dramatically, which benefits fish.

Still, environmental activists dispute the need for more snowmaking at Vail or at other resorts. They contend that increased snowmaking at large resorts like Vail put small skiareas at a disadvantage, and force even similarly sized resorts to keep up. They liken it to an arms race, and say that what began with terrain expansions has spread to snowmaking.

They want to see more cumulative analysis of environmental effects, a concept the Environmental Protection Agency has begun to take to heart. They also want broader analysis of ski area capacity, on regional and perhaps national levels. And finally, they suggest the heart of their dispute is improper influence by profit-seeking businesses over natural resources decisions.

“What gets me fired up is corporate dominance of the public lands. And that’s just not right,” says Jeff Parson, a Colorado Wild director. Amid this dispute, Forest Service snow rangers feel they’re getting beat up by activists at every turn. So does the ski industry. “They just don’t like anything we do,” says one exasperated ski area planner. Geraldine Hughes, a staff attorney for the National Ski Areas Association, sees a fundamental philosophical conflict over the value of technology.

“Perhaps we should remove all of the lifts at resorts as well? And why not the restrooms? It sure would be a more natural, authentic experience,” she says. “It all comes down to how you view technology. Resorts view it favorably. In fact, without the technology in place at ski areas across the country, millions of Americans would not be exposed to, nor appreciate as much, the natural beauty that awaits them in the mountains.” Hughes also maintains that environmental groups are pushing for cumulative impacts analysis beyond what is required by law.

At Forest Service headquarters in Washington D.C., Ken Karkula, who directs the agency’s recreational special use program, likewise rejects stretching the cumulative impacts analysis. “We can only go as far as the law requires,” he says. He also sees no need for widespread analysis of ski area capacity.

Back in Colorado, Smith sees the flurry of snowmaking expansions being pursued by ski areas after two slow-starting winters, and detects panic—and arrogance. “There has to be a limit,” he says. “Snowmaking is not really about skiing; it’s about trying to evade the limitations of Mother Nature.”