In early July at the Boreal Mountain Resort, temperatures reached 91 degrees Fahrenheit
(33 degrees Celsius), which is not uncharacteristically hot in California at the crest of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. The real surprise was that the ski area near Lake Tahoe was making snow.
Boreal is the site of the first North American demonstration of a relatively new technology called Snowfactory. The process parallels that of an industrial icemaker — essentially, a large-scale version of the icemaker in the door of many household refrigerators.
An icemaker takes water chilled with a heat exchanger and sprays it onto a surface. The cubes are created by imposing the ice onto a grid. In a unit about the size of a trailer, such as the type pulled by 18-wheeler trucks, Snowfactory uses the same process to produce flat flakes that are collected on a panel and fed into a conveyor belt. The flakes are then blown through a pipe up to 600 feet (183 meters) long to the desired location on the ski slope. [Photos: The 8 Coldest Places on Earth https://www.livescience.com/55957-new-snow-making-tech-enables-summer-skiing.html
