Marmot Basin steams snow-maker water lines

Warm temperatures over the past few weeks have left some skiers and snowboarders anxious over a lack of snow up at Marmot Basin, but at this point, there’s not much Marmot can do about it. 

Jasper’s bitterly cold temperatures in December and early January froze and plugged up the mountain’s snowmaking water supply. 

People traveling up Marmot Basin Road may have noticed a large truck parked alongside the road near the hill with some sort of apparatus extending from it into the ground. The truck is steaming the water line to alleviate the clog.

According to Rob Ford, mountain operations manager at Marmot, “we had a slowdown in our water supply because it’s getting later in the season and we basically just had an ice plug form at one end of the pipe and the water backed up and froze.” 

“It (line freezing) is not uncommon with snowmaking,” said Ford, “so what we’re doing is steaming the line to thaw it out. We’re hoping to fire up mid-February just to make a little snow to get us through the rest of the reason,” he added. 

The freeze-up is “not like, ‘Oh my God, this messed up our plans’,” said Brian Rode, vice president of marketing and sales. “The majority (85 per cent) of our snowmaking is scheduled before we open for the season,” he said.

It’s likely that snow depth concerns were assuaged with the big snow dump Marmot received last Friday night providing for a great and very busy Saturday on the hill. Another thing to keep in mind is that Punxsutawney Phil (the famous groundhog) saw his shadow on Feb. 2, meaning that an early spring is unlikely. 

Jasper is due to receive approximately another 15 centimetres of snow this weekend – which hopefully means we’ve got lots of powder days to come.