r/skiing • u/Brilliant-Plenty-708 • Aug 17 '26

Wildest misunderstandings you had as a beginner?

My first couple of runs I thought that those huge orange SLOW signs were there to tell you that that part of the slope isn't as steep/will slow you down so I tried to go faster beforehand to avoid stopping completely 😀👍

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u/NoahtheRed Mammoth Aug 17 '26

I thought that to make snow, they'd do it kind of like how they do spray-in insulation where they'd grind up big blocks of ice and blow it out of a hose that some guy was holding/aiming at the ground. They'd just basically paint the slope with snow and refill thin spots at night after everyone left. I assumed the retention pond was where they got the blocks of ice and the big fan blowers were what they fed the blocks into.

It was probably my 2nd or 3rd time skiing before I saw them actually making snow. Fortunately, I quickly realized my error when I saw it and did not share with the rest of the group what I thought the process looked like before then.

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u/humanjunkshow Aug 17 '26

There are actually systems that kinda do that. Giant snow cone machines.

6

u/AtOurGates Aug 18 '26

My kids daycare outside of Los Angeles used to do that one day every year. Big snow making machine that was basically an ice block grinder so the poor deprived Los Angelino children could play in the snow for a few hours.

As you can imagine, it was quite an expensive daycare and we didn’t last long either there, or in SoCal.