Anchorage Daily News

With 31 snow guns painting the slopes white, the Alyeska Resort in Girdwood salvaged a perfectly seasonable Christmas holiday from the wreckage of Southcentral weather patterns gone haywire.

Half a foot of man-made snow had already been sprinkled on the resort's lower slopes in the week before Mother Nature finally decided to pitch in. She brought snows for Christmas Eve at the state's largest and best-known ski area.

It was a pleasant change from what has happened on some Christmases in the not-too-distant past when instead of snow the low-elevation resort got rain. With its base area sitting only 250 feet above sea level, Alyeska is the lowest-elevation ski area on the continent.

Skiers need not worry about altitude sickness, but global warming is another matter. It hit the resort hard with late November rains that washed away early-season snows.

And to make matters worse, base-area temperatures afterward remained so warm it was impossible to make snow.

Up high, it was different.

There was plenty of wet, heavy snow, which brought a different set of problems.

Avalanche danger kept the resort closed through the Thanksgiving holiday, and a glide-crack avalanche that bent a tower for the high-speed quad chair lift temporarily shut down access to much of the upper mountain.

All of that would appear to be fading into history. The snows look to have come to Girdwood to stay. Alyeska can get rain in any month, but January and February are the months when the precipitation is least likely to come down as water.

Meanwhile, the area appears to be shifting out of its earlier global-warming funk. Late December temperatures near or below historic averages allowed the resort to crank up new snow-making equipment, a key part of $25 million worth of upgrades at the resort this year.

As of Dec. 20, resort spokesman Jason Lott was reporting that all 31 snow guns on the mountain were firing around the clock.

In one 24-hour period alone, he said, "these high-power machines have converted 2 million gallons of water'' to snow.

The flood of man-made snow blanketed Alyeska's lower slopes as up high, continuing snowstorms pushed the year's top-of-mountain snow fall to near 25 feet.

Upper mountain skiing has been generally good all season, but it wasn't until mid-month that Alyeska was able to blow enough artificial snow onto the lower slopes to make it possible to ski off the mountain rather than ride the tramway back down. Thanks to the modern miracle of snow making, Main Street, the Weir, and the Ego Flats/Runway, along with the Autobahn and the North Face Exit Trail, are now good top to bottom.

Snow making has also allowed Alyeska to begin night skiing under the lights, when visibility is often better than in the flat-light of the short Alaska days of December and January.

Alyeska even has a "magic carpet'' running near the day lodge to move beginners around on the ski area's easiest slope. A conveyor belt for moving snowboarders and skiers, these are the latest in-thing at American ski resorts.

Find Craig Medred online at adn.com/contact/cmedred or call 257-4588.

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