It’s 125 metres long, 35 metres wide, almost 11 metres high, and with a little luck, it will still be around when the next ski season starts.
Ski Martock, a resort about 60 kilometres northwest of Halifax, is trying to get a jump on next winter’s season with a giant pile of snow draped in what is essentially a high-tech insulated blanket.
“It’s got 18,000 cubic metres of snow in it, so we’ve got it under cover, and our goal is to hang on to as much of it as we can to get started next season a little bit earlier,” Andy MacLean, the resort’s operations manager, said in an interview.
Crews at Ski Martock pushed as much snow as they could into the big pile when the ski season ended. Workers then rolled out strips of geotextile fabric, which insulates the pile, reflects sunlight and protects the snow from wind and rain. MacLean says the pile could lose 50 per cent of its volume by the time the new season rolls around in December, but he’s been told the average is closer to 30 or 40 per cent.
The technology was installed with the help of Czech Republic-based Snow Support. Some of the snow, especially around the corners of the blanket, is covered with 30 centimetres of wood chips acting as insulation.
“You’ve heard stories, I’m sure, of people cutting ice in the wintertime and then storing it in sawdust, in an ice house, to get ice all summer long on those hot days. So it’s really just a scaled-up version of that,” MacLean said.
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Preserving snow under thermal-insulating covers, a practice known as “snow farming,” began on ski hills in Europe and has been garnering interest around the world. MacLean says Ski Martock got the idea from Sun Peaks Resort, about 55 kilometres northeast of Kamloops, B.C., the first in Canada to try it out.
Christina Antoniak, director of brand and communications at Sun Peaks, says the resort spent $180,000 on its blanket system, developed by Finnish firm Snow Secure. It was installed on top of 14,000 cubic metres of snow in May 2025. By October, 80 per cent of it was still there.
Antoniak says the resort was able to spread the remaining snow over the bottom portion of its Nancy Green International Race Centre, helping ensure it would open on time despite variable weather patterns. Members of Alpine Canada’s NextGen ski team, a high-performance development program, were training at the site in November and were impressed with the quality, she said.
“Of course the snow changes consistency as it’s stored over the warmer months,” Antoniak said in an interview. “It gets a little bit more compressed and harder packed and that’s actually an ideal snow surface for racers because they want hard and fast snow to train on.”
She says the system worked so well that Sun Peaks has invested in two more this year at a cost of about $400,000.
While the B.C. resort usually spends all of its early season snow-making efforts on the race centre so high-performance athletes can train as early as possible, it’s hoped the stored snow will allow it to pivot and make snow in other areas, resulting in an earlier season for the general public.
“Our phones have been ringing off the hook just from an industry perspective, people wanting to hear about our project, how did it go, as they’re considering this sort of technology for their own ski areas,” said Antoniak. “So we think that’s fantastic if it’s a way to give our industry some resilience at a time of the year when things are just becoming a little bit more challenging and unpredictable.”
MacLean says snow-making at Martock, with its relatively low elevation and Nova Scotia weather, is always a challenge but the resort hasn’t missed a season in six decades.
“Our biggest challenge has always been that maritime climate that we deal with, high humidity, the variable temperature swings, the rain that we get, always in January,” said MacLean. “I mean climate change is certainly contributing to the challenges with those hot summers. But for us, winter has always been a real challenge in this region.”
He says the goal is to get Martock’s main ski run open sometime in December. Snow-making equipment will be needed, but the stockpile should help crews get a jump on the work as some of its 100,000 annual visitors get antsy to hit the slopes. If it works well, Ski Martock and its sister resort, Cape Breton’s Ski Cape Smokey, may expand their use of the system.
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