At Sunday River, snow is what we do best. The resort has the largest, most technically advanced snowmaking system in the east, not to mention a veteran team of snowmakers who are passionate about what they do. This combination has allowed Sunday River to beat out every other East Coast resort in the race to open, opening this year on October 14 and on Halloween in both 2007 and 2008.
As Sunday River celebrates its 50th birthday this season, it’s hard not to look back and time and see the significance of snowmaking and how it has shaped where we are today. Sunday River’s very first opening day was December 19, 1959 but it wasn’t until the seventies that the resort recognized the need for a consistent snow product through the art of snowmaking. Josef “Sepp” Gmuender was hired as the new General Manager for the Sunday River Skiway in the summer of 1970 and it was he who proposed the very first snowmaking system at the resort. Sepp presented to the Board of Directors the need for guaranteed skiing in December in a report that outlined how much it would cost, what was needed to get it done, and what the return on investment would be. In a matter of months, Sepp had the approval of the Board and Sunday River was well on its way to becoming the first alpine resort in Maine with a snowmaking system.
Today, snowmaking is still considered top priority. So much so that Sunday River's snowmaking arsenal includes over 1,900 state-of-the-art snow guns; enough to leave nearly every trail at the resort snow-covered for most of the season. These snow guns are spread out along 72 miles of pipes which cover 92% of the resort’s terrain.
In 2008, Sunday River introduced $14.2 million in capital improvements including 75 Boyne-developed Low-Energy fan guns designed for high-efficiency snowmaking. Sunday River also utilizes tower guns on many key trails which produce snow from a nozzle nearly 30 feet in the air, allowing the water droplets more air time to form into large snow crystals before landing. Additionally, Sunday River utilizes computers to control snow quality. While some ski areas rely on snowmaking crews to literally hold their coat sleeves in a plume of snow to judge its quality, a Sunday River snowmaker enters conditional information into a computer, which then calculates the optimum setting for the guns at that location. Conditional information is based on the air and water pressure and weather data relayed by five remove weather stations at different elevation bands on the mountain.
One result of Sunday River's snowmaking efforts is illustrated in the fact that Sunday River is the second largest ski resort in New England and one of the most visited with a half a million skiers and riders travelling to the resort annually. Averaging 167in of snow annually, Sunday River has made a name for itself as one of the best groomed resorts with 620 of the resort’s 671 acres shaped into perfect corduroy daily. This is why we can claim to have the most dependable snow in New England.