Gore and Whiteface both have 30 acre feet per day of snowmaking capability. I think Hunter has about 100 acre feet per day. Maybe you can enlighten me there. Anyway, when the system was built, we seemed to get more natural snow, and not nearly as much rain, and warm. In my vague memory, winters prior to 2012 involved much fewer rain events and more natural dumps. With the location of Gore and Whiteface in a good winter which would have been considered normal 5-10 years ago 30 acre feet per day was plenty to get everything open by MLK weekend. I agree that both mountains should probably upgrade pumping capacity to 45+ acre feet per day. I know Hunter is in a very poor location for snow, but it is also much smaller, and the fact that Hunter has 3X the snowmaking capacity seems like a problem to me.
But everything costs money, and that will effect the cost of lift tickets. However, the cost of adding an additional 2000 GPM, and maybe another 10,000 CFM of air would probably cost less than the ADK express II. And those numbers would give Gore and WF roughly an additional 15 Acre feet per day. My highly educated guess is as follows:
When it comes to high pressure water pumping you have to figure $150 per gallon per minute. That means that adding 2000 GPM would cost roughly 30K.
With compressed air, you have to figure about $90 per CFM. This is putting the cost of additional air capacity at 90K. You would only need this much air if you continued using high energy air/water guns. I am starting to see more and more Low E guns popping up around Gore, so more than likely they are not using all their air most of the time. By using as many lowE and fan guns as possible in areas where they are acceptable, the need for additional air might be slim to none. I know Gore can run Low E Guns at the top of the gondola. The only places they can't are in areas that are very far away, or at higher elevations such as the summit. I peaked in a valve house near the intersection of Cloud and Headwaters once and saw that the pressure was only about 200 PSI which leads me to believe they probably only have 125 PSI or so at the very top. Just enough to run an air/water gun. Anyway I think 10,000 CFM is a generous amount of air to add, and they may not need that much.
The other factor to consider is water velocity in the pipes. Based on the size of the pipes I see, they should be able to handle quite a lot of water, but I could be wrong. In order to effectively handle additional water flow, the main from the plant to where it can be split off onto different trails may need to be increased. It's hard to say, I would hope they made it large enough to support additional water flow. Putting in a new pipeline would be difficult considering it has to go under the road, and all the way down to the Hudson river. Once it gets to the point where it can split off onto different trails, the water velocity shouldn't be a problem. I have no idea what that part of the project would cost, or if it would even need to be done.
But if it did need to be upgraded, I could see that being a huge stumbling block, and could get really expensive really fast.
Anyone else have any ideas?
Anyway, add the cost of the additional water and air and you get about 1.2 million. That number is based off brand new equipment. Go Plattekill style, and you could probably cut that number 1/2. Also add the cost of installation, and potentially expanding putting an addition of the plant. I'm going to add another 500K for this. Then Lets assume that we do in fact have to upgrade the first part of the pipeline, and I am going to be aggressive and say that will also cost a Million. But it could even be more. That puts the total cost of the project at 2.8 Million.
Does anyone know how much the ADK Express II cost? I could be totally wrong here, but I think the upgrade could be completed for less than 2.8M. Would be very beneficial to both mountains IMO.
I'll take boilerplate ice over wet snow any day
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