Snowmaking operations at Winter Park get a significant upgrade, Colorado resort boosts pumping capacity

Winter Park Resort is now saying it might be in the running for first to open next year, if Colorado's weather helps them out.

This comes after major upgrades to its snowmaking abilities, not necessarily with hardware, but capacity, namely water capacity.

"We are upgrading our pumping capacity from 2,500 gallons a minute to over 6,000 gallons a minute," Bob Holme, Winter Park Director of Mountain Maintenance explained. "It's 2.5 times the volume of water moving this year."

That's made possible with a new storage pond for all that water they are now moving through the snow guns. The retention pond will also double as a dipping pond for helicopters should they need water to fight a fire in the summer, and there's plenty to pull. Streams all run into the same area, pooling into a reservoir with some serious holding power.

"It holds over 13 million gallons," Holme said with a smile. He believes this is one of the biggest upgrades the resort has gotten in decades.

"We are going into our 85th season. Our original snowmaking went in in 1976 ... so if you think of our archaic snowmaking that we had until now where we have leapfrogged into 2024, it is really exciting."

That's how the resort believes they'll now be in the running for first to open, should Mother Nature give them a helping hand, too. Normally resorts like Arapahoe Basin, Loveland and Wolf Creek take the first-to-open winner award (the latter won this year), but Winter Park believes it could be a contender.

"For Winter Park Resort we are finally catching up to where a lot of the other resorts have been for years," Holme said. "Now we are not only able to compete on timing of when we open but the kind of terrain we open once we do."

Winter Park opens up for the season Friday.