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Snowmaking underway as ski areas compete to open first for 2026/27 season
10/22/2026 | 1m 46sVideo has Closed Captions
Snowmaking is underway ahead of the 2026/27 ski season in Colorado
Keystone senior director of mountain operations Kate Schifani spoke with Rocky Mountain PBS about the resort's snowmaking operations and decades-long competition with nearby Arapahoe Basin and Loveland Ski Area to open their slopes first.
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RMPBS News is a local public television program presented by RMPBS
RMPBS News
Snowmaking underway as ski areas compete to open first for 2026/27 season
10/22/2026 | 1m 46sVideo has Closed Captions
Keystone senior director of mountain operations Kate Schifani spoke with Rocky Mountain PBS about the resort's snowmaking operations and decades-long competition with nearby Arapahoe Basin and Loveland Ski Area to open their slopes first.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
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Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorshipSnowmaking is mostly science but maybe a little magic.
Two days ago, this was just absolutely dirt.
And in a few days, hopefully from now, we'll be skiing it.
Our reliance on snowmaking, I think is more of a shift on how we think about what we want the early season guest experience to be and we want it to be as good as it can.
And so snowmaking kind of enables that for us.
It starts with a process called nucleation, which creates really, really tiny drops of water that simulate the drops of water that exist kind of naturally in snow clouds.
We have a pretty sophisticated system of pumps that move the water up the mountain and then into the guns and then into snow.
Somewhere between where it leaves the gun and the ground The water droplets will turn into crystals that would look closer to what you see from natural snow.
Obviously the whole ski industry is weather-dependent to some degree, but snowmaking probably more so.
The colder it gets, the better we do.
So we look at the wet bulb temperature which is kind of an amalgamation of temperature, wind speed and humidity.
There's a fine line between too wet and too dry And our snow makers spend a lot of time making sure that we're just right.
We have this fun rivalry with A-Basin and sometimes Loveland.
You know we're always gunning to see who can get it done first.
It feels good to win, so we're hoping we do that again.
Were gonna open as soon as were ready.
So no, we don't have a date.
We opened on October 25th last year.
We bought some shovels in case it snows a lot and We have practice from last season in case it doesnt.
We still had a great year and either way we're gonna have a great year this year.
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