55brought back from two winters of shooting on the
range’s peaks do just that. The ski seasons go on
as they always have, but the trails look unhappily
out of place—wide white avenues of snow cut
across a landscape of dead grass, dead scrub and
pebbled paths.
The skiers themselves seem out of place too,
relaxing in chaise longues on the dry ground beside
the trails, or arriving at the slopes in ski pants and
T-shirts, because why bundle up when the tempera-
ture is a balmy 50°F? “It was incredibly hot for that
time of year,” says Zorzanello. “And this was 2,100 m
[6,900 ft.] up the mountain.”
Just as jarring are the images of trucks dumping
fresh snow on the trails and of useless snowmobiles
that would normally be busy set aside and covered
by tarps. And everywhere, up and down the trails,
are the snowmaking machines—a technology that’s
gotten more refined as the need has gotten greater.
It was in 1936 that Japanese physicist Ukichiro
Nakaya created the first artificial snowflake in
a sealed chamber in his laboratory at Hokkaido
University. That was no small feat, since snow is
much more than just frozen water falling from the
sky. You could get that much from hail, which is
nothing but wind-driven raindrops that combine
and freeze at high altitudes. A snowflake forms
when water vapor condenses into infinitesimal
micro-droplets and the droplets then find a
nucleus—typically an even smaller grain of
atmospheric dust—to which they attach and
crystallize. More vapor collects on the crystal,
producing a larger flake, which eventually grows
big enough and heavy enough to fall to the ground.
Nakaya nucleated his first flakes on the fur of
rabbits, inspired by a single flake he spotted on a
single rabbit hair. One flake at a time, of course, is
no way to make enough snow to cover a slope; what
was needed was a way to manufacture the stuff
in bulk.Snow blowers
operate
throughout
winter. In the
Dolomites, it
takes 4,700
of them to
keep the
trails covered
for skiing