After the success of two all-weather snowmaking machines at Glencoe and The Lecht allowing the Scottish 2018-19 ski season to get underway on December 1st, a third of Scotland's five commercial ski fields looks set to open imminently after it purchased one of the machines too.
Cairngorm Mountain's owners, the public body Highlands & Islands Enterprise (HIE) spent £1m on snowmaking recently including a SnowFactory unit that is double the size of the two operating at the other two areas.
It was delivered and installed in early December and has been producing snow over the past week or so, now creating large piles ready to spread on the slopes.
Unfortunately Cairngorm's former operators went bust in November and it appears a recently-formed new operator created by HIE has not been able to use the ski area's existing web page and social media outlets to provide updates on conditions. However a newly created Facebook page facebook.com/cairngormteam/ is providing updates and images and has quickly gained more than 2,000 followers in the few days since it was set up.
The page does not yet give an opening date for snowsports however.
SnowFactory machines make snow within large articulated units then spray it out through tubes on to the slopes. It is a manually labour intensive process and can physically cover only limited areas but does enable snowsports. Because the snow is made inside the refrigerated unit it does not matter what the outdoor temperature is, but once spread on the slopes the snow thaws as usual if its above freezing and the machine is used to top up cover. At Glencoe and the Lecht the machines have helped build and maintain runs several hundred metres long.
Temperatures on Scottish hills were sub-zero in the run up to Christmas but are now above freezing again and there is not enough natural snowcover for centres to open so far.