Weather, snow base and snowmaking
How the season unfolds, what weather does to skiers, and when snow guns pay off.
Each season runs through early winter, a cold deep winter, a thawing spring and a summer off-season. Weather comes in fronts that last a few days, and the forecast on the weather page is exact: plan around it.
Weather and skiers
The day's weather changes how many skiers come:
- Sunny: +10%
- Partly Cloudy: +5%
- Cloudy: normal
- Light Snow: +5%
- Heavy Snow: −15%
- Blizzard: −50%
- Freezing Rain: −25%
- Rain: −30%
- Wind of 50 km/h or more puts lifts on hold: another −25%.
Below freezing it snows; around 0–1°C it's freezing rain, and above that, rain. Rain leaves slopes icy and wears them like a warm day.
The snow base
The natural base starts the season at 20 cm, grows with snowfall and shrinks with warm days and rain. While it's under 30 cm, slopes wear faster unless a snow gun covers them.
Snow guns
- A gun that's switched on runs on any day with at least one hour at -2°C or colder (a few models work up to 0°C, and the all-weather SnowFactory at any temperature). On warmer days it waits and costs nothing.
- Each running gun covers as many slopes as its capacity: the slope you give it priority on first, then the worst slopes left.
- Running guns use energy and water; whatever your own sources don't supply is bought.
- A snowmaker assigned to a gun cuts its wear by 1% a day.
Guns matter most early in the season and in spring, when the base is thin. In a deep midwinter base they don't change wear at all.