I sold my skis before I moved to North Carolina. That turned out to be a dumb move, because this subtropical state actually has the highest mountains on the East Coast, and it gets plenty cold from December through February. For a few months each winter, you can go skiing and snow tubing and sledding. But you’ll likely be doing these things at a place with man-made snow. You can count on the cold—where I live, one recent February averaged 27 degrees for the entire month—but you can’t count on the snow. The weather runs either cold and clear or wet and warm.

Still, about once a year, the forces align for a snowstorm, by which I mean an inch or three. School is canceled and a local golf course morphs into a ski lodge as kids sled down the hill at the driving range and parents cluster around the fireplace at the bar. It’s great fun. After a few years in North Carolina, I began to have a thought that had never entered my brain in 30 years of living in New England: If only it snowed more. A few winters ago, as I watched my kids attempt backyard sledding atop a pathetic crust of ice that barely covered the grass, I wondered if there was a way to crowbar nature into giving us more. Man-made snow is possible, and I wanted to make it.

But how? Do you buy equipment from a defunct ski resort? Can you just spray a pressure washer in the air? I realized I have no idea how snowmakers work. But on a cold winter day, it’s a short trip from total ignorance to contemplating the finer points of nucleation nozzles and the Joule-Thomson effect—which is, of course, when a compressed gas is allowed to rapidly expand, thus causing a cooling effect. Then you’ll also want to study up on meteorology (specifically, the concept of wet-bulb temperature) and continuous-use versus oil-free air compressors.

Making backyard snow. Jaime Dee Wilson

My research leads me to Connecticut-based Snow At Home, which manufactures residential-size snowmakers and seems to have a lot of experience sussing out what works and what doesn’t. They’ll sell you just the nozzles for $69, but a complete package—a SnoPro snowmaker, Ingersoll Rand air compressor, and 1.3-gallon-per-minute electric pressure washer—costs $948. But hey, I needed a new air compressor and a pressure washer anyway, right? The SnoPro, Snow At Home’s smallest snowmaker, can produce 46 cubic feet of snow per hour. The next model up, the SG6 Xstream, can crank out 80 cubic feet per hour. That’s enough to cover a 50-by-25-foot area in six inches of snow over eight hours. It costs $698 before you add the larger compressor and pump. Ah, decisions.

I’m making snow at my house, hundreds of miles south of the Mason-Dixon line.

Not long ago, I was on the fence about this whole idea. A snow gun is a ludicrous thing to purchase. But then I thought, When I’m old and wizened, looking back on my life, am I going to regret buying a snowmaker? Hell no. That is a completely excellent thing to buy. I spend enough money on responsible grown-up stuff like life insurance and nose-hair trimmers. Maybe sometimes it’s okay to buy a contraption that would be atop the shopping list of an eight-year-old who won the lottery.

And as long as you’re buying a snowmaker, you may as well step up to the SG6 Xstream. (Look, honey, at least I didn’t go for the SG7.) To furnish the SG6’s three nozzles with high-pressure air and water, I procure a 5.5-cubic-foot-per-minute Campbell Hausfeld air compressor and a . Now, I can inflate a truck tire in about three seconds and blast mildew off my deck from 50 paces. And also make a whole lot of snow.



Beers around the fire pit at the only sledding party within hundreds of miles. Jaime Dee Wilson

But for that, I have to wait for the weather to get on my side, which ideally means temperatures in the 20s and low humidity. That’s for crisp, dry snow. You can make wetter snow at temperatures up to 39 degrees Fahrenheit, if the humidity is low enough. But 29 degrees is your max for dry snow. And if it gets down to 20 degrees, humidity doesn’t even matter—you’re going to have nice snow.

In the meantime, I have another challenge: My property doesn’t have much in the way of elevation. There’s a banking next to the driveway, but the drop might be four or five feet. And if you’ve got a sweet snowmaker, you want a more serious sledding run than that. So I build a ramp. My ambitions begin with something modest, a small skate-park kicker, then predictably spiral out of control once I start building.

By the time I’m done, the ramp is so tall that the top of it actually has a view. There are two distinct drop angles—black-diamond steep for the first eight feet, transitioning to a more modest slope for the next eight feet before leading onto the final drop off the banking. Since I don’t really know what I’m doing, I overbuild, with 4 x 4 posts through-bolted to a frame of 2 x 4s and double-layered plywood for the floor. As an unforeseen bonus, I’ve now got a launch platform for a zipline. The things I do to get the kids off the . I christen my creation Mount Diablo, then walk around saying things like, “Better get your oxygen mask if you’re summiting Diablo” and “The Sherpas refuse to climb Diablo, but we leave base camp at daybreak because I don’t believe in curses.”

The first night that the temperature drops into the 20s, I get up at 4 a.m. I connect the air hose to the compressor and the water hose to the pressure washer. I plug everything in, using heavy-gauge extension cords. When I turn on the water, a fine mist starts blasting from the nozzles. Then, I introduce the compressed air and the mist explodes into a fast-moving white cloud, an extremely localized weather event just for me. Even with the garage floodlight on, I can’t really see what’s happening up in the air. But I see it on the ground—a fine white layer coating the gravel, then my car. It’s working!

Ezra Dyer

It’s wet snow, sure, because the conditions aren’t great. But as proof of concept, I’m thrilled. I’m making snow at my house, hundreds of miles south of the Mason-Dixon line. No longer will freezing temperatures equate to indoor boredom. There will be sledding and snowball fights and, okay, maybe some shoveling. But only on my terms, for I shall choose where it snows and where it does not. Around here, the local meteorologists have it all wrong, for they know not of the mighty SG6 Xstream, purveyor of on-demand frozen precipitation. This is going to be the best winter ever. I’d imagined, when I assembled my snowmaking equipment and built a huge ramp, that we’d have sledding parties of the kind I enjoyed growing up in Maine. And on New Year’s Day, that’s exactly what happens. Overnight, the temperature drops to 16 degrees. I run the SG6 all night, and in the morning Mount Diablo glistens with a blanket of blinding white powder. I adjust the gun to dump on the run-out area, across the driveway and the lawn.

Paul Dana, seven, rides a flying saucer down Mount Diablo. Jaime Dee Wilson

Friends and neighbors show up, bringing kids and sleds and coffee. We hang out around the fire pit wearing ski gear while the kids explore the recreational possibilities of this novel medium. Some of them build a snow fort on the lawn while others construct sledding jumps. Some kids just throw snow at each other. I point the SG6 at my friend Keith’s Jeep and blast it with powder, just to confuse everyone else he encounters on the road. Where did that guy come from?

Blasting the Rubicon with snow just to confuse local motorists. Ezra Dyer

I’ll admit that when I set off down the road to amateur weathermaking, I was a little worried that the end result wouldn’t be as great as I’d built it up to be in my head. Maybe the snow gun wouldn’t make enough, or it would be too warm, or, worst of all, my kids just wouldn’t care. None of that was true. Owning a snow gun is completely awesome. For the first time in years, I’m looking forward to winter. I really shouldn’t have sold my skis.



This appears in the March 2019 issue. Want more Popular Mechanics? Get Instant Access!

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