Flagstaff Resort To Open On Friday With Man-Made Snow
A Flagstaff crew has been working the wee hours of the morning in freezing temperatures to make enough snow to open Snowbowl on Friday. This will be the Flagstaff ski resort’s second full season with man-made snow. Getting the approval to make snow did not come easy.
Last season was the second-driest on record. Snowbowl’s Jason Stratton said with the ability to make snow out of reclaimed wastewater, the resort was able to be open 122 days.
"We estimate if we did not have snowmaking we probably would have been open 7-10 days last year," Stratton said. "Literally just over Christmas and that would have been it."
Stratton’s old boss Eric Borowski just sold the resort after 23 years to James Coleman, who now owns three other resorts in the Southwest that rely on snowmaking. Borowski was determined to see snowmaking become a reality in Flagstaff. He fought a decade’s-long legal battle against 13 Native American tribes that consider the mountain sacred.
"It’s something that worries me all the time when I pray or when I participate in ceremonies I question the effectiveness of those prayers," said Klee Benally, an activist and member of the Navajo Nation.
Benally also worries about the environmental impacts of pumping reclaimed waste water up on the peaks.
Biology professor Catherine Propper has studied animals exposed to the treated waste water in her lab at Northern Arizona University.
"And we have found that it looks like some component in the water and we don’t know what that is might affect endocrine function," Propper said. "We do not know, though, how that translates into an environmental impact."
She said the findings might be different when exposed to ultraviolet rays and temperature change. Propper and the city’s advisory panel concluded they didn’t have data to support the hypothesis that human health would be affected.
Still Propper said she wouldn’t encourage children eat the snow because more research needs to be done to learn exactly what’s in there.
