Photography and Essay by Hubert Schriebl
Early in October, I started bringing firewood closer to the house, as I had seen a couple of wooly bears among the fallen leaves. These particular fuzzy caterpillars had black stripes in the front and back, and a wide light brown stripe in between. A sure sign of a long and snowy winter - or is that a short and mild winter?!
But if you really want to have snow on the trails, the best thing to do is to rely on the snowmakers who roam the mountains at night, moving and positioning the mighty snow guns - and mixing compressed air with water to create snow, supplementing nature! Snow is considered by skiers and snowboarders to be White Gold -- would making it be a kind of alchemy? Creating valuable snow out of thin air, like creating pure gold out of simple lead (that in the middle ages was considered blasphemous -- no messing around with nature - punishable by death)? The difference is, of course, that our mountain crews today can actually accomplish this, making snow using scientific and engineering formulas.
Snow makers are a special breed, very much like mountain climbers. Their work takes them into the rough elements and challenges of severe winters -- often rewarded by the solitude of a beautiful dawn coming after a long night.
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