The Soldier Hollow Nordic Center has a secret. It already has a lot of the snow it needs to open this winter.
Hidden behind a grove of trees a few hundred feet from the base lodge is an unusual sight for the middle of summer in the Heber Valley.
“From a science standpoint, we basically made a glacier,” said Soldier Hollow Operations Manager Bill Pierce. “And we protected the glacier with insulation on top, and then a geotech fabric that's very similar to the thickness of a heavy wool blanket.”
Imagine a 50,000-cubic-foot loaf of bread, roughly the size of an ice skating rink, covered in a gigantic white blanket. There’s also a waterproof cover and a few inches of foam insulation underneath.
Utah has had a hot, dry summer. Even up here in the Wasatch Back, it’s 95 degrees during the day in late July, but underneath the blanket, it’s more like 35 degrees. Touching it, you can feel how cool the blanket is and hear the crunch of snow underneath.
It’s a $300,000 proof-of-concept project spearheaded by the Utah Olympic Legacy Foundation, which operates many of the state’s Olympic venues, including Soldier Hollow. The location hosted cross-country skiing and biathlon events in 2002 and expects to do the same when the Winter Games return in 2034.
Preserving snow over the summer is far from a novel idea, said Chief Operating Officer Calum Clark. It’s been a fairly common practice for years in places like Scandinavia, he said, where snow is pushed into a dark area with tall trees to help block the sun before being covered in a thick layer of wood chips and left to hibernate over the hottest months of the year.
“We've been ideating on the concept of how to do snow storage, and we did some analysis on the wood chipping, and quickly decided that that was not a good return on investment,” Clark said. “That’s just tremendously labor intensive for what we had, as well as that question of we're at a lot lower latitude and have really warm summers with intense sunlight.”
The solution became the space-age blanket and insulation method, which Pierce said is the first of its kind at a Nordic venue in North America. He and his team made the snow over 18 days during the coldest part of last winter solely trying to preserve it over the summer. He said the pile accounted for about one-third of their total water use last winter.
Pierce said the hardest part about the project’s first year is that the ground in Utah doesn’t get cold enough for long enough to permanently freeze, so they’re doing that artificially.
“The first year we'll lose the most snow because when I said we create a glacier, the big thing that we create is we turn the ground under this pile into permafrost,” he said. “So then the second, third year we aren't getting thermal melt from the bottom. We're only getting it from the top, and as long as we protect it, this glacier will last as if it was up at 15,000 feet.”
He expects the pile to shrink by about 20% this summer, but hopes to get closer to 15% in future years.
The effort will only become more important as climate change continues, Clark said, and the 2034 Olympics approach.
“Having our worst season on record certainly gets you to sit up straight and think about how you can deliver a sustainable venue for all the constituents,” he said.
That’s because artificial snowmaking is expensive and highly weather dependent.
The 2002 Games had a no-snow contingency plan that involved dump trucks full of snow coming in from nearby Strawberry Reservoir, which sits roughly 2,000 feet higher than Soldier Hollow. If this project proves fruitful, emergency snow could be stored on-location years in advance of 2034.
The other benefit, said Clark, comes in the form of increased on-snow time, not just for the general public, but for elite athletes hoping to represent their country on the world’s biggest stage.
“As we think about those folks that are heavily invested into the sport of cross-country skiing, it's a big commitment, and there are groups that will travel to places in order to get on snow for that experience for training,” he said. “They need to have a higher degree of confidence that the destination that they're going to has the snow that they're seeking, and this is one of those steps to provide that guarantee.”
Right off the bat, it means more skiing this coming winter. Pierce expects enough snow to survive this summer to have a 2-kilometer loop open as soon as temperatures get cold enough where the snow doesn’t need to be stored underneath the blanket.
“When I first got here, we opened either at Christmas or a week and a half before,” he said. “Right now, our goal is we've been opening at Thanksgiving, and the goal now is to get to somewhere between the 5th and 15th of November.”
