Killington Adding Over 1,000 New Snow Guns

Killington Resort in Vermont, which has recently announced that its coming back under local ownership after more than four decades, has unveiled one of the biggest (possibly the biggest) snowmaking investments of all time.

Over the next two seasons the largest mountain resort in Eastern North America, will install more than 1000 new energy-efficient snow guns in a $7 million spend which will deliver greatly reduced power consumption for snowmaking and in consequence much lower CO2 emissions too.

“This is the most transformative snowmaking project since Killington expanded over to Bear Mountain in the late 70’s,” says Snowmaking Manager Greg Gleason. “It’s great to see the resort investing in low energy snow guns, not only will it save on costs, it will allow us to expand terrain at a much faster rate in the early season, while still providing a quality product to our guests.”

For the upcoming 2024 season, Killington and neighbouring Pico ski areas will be adding 36 HKD Snowmakers Phazer portable snowmaking guns and installing 454 HKD Impulse and Phazer R5 tower guns as well as four fully automatic HKD Diablo fan guns.

The next year an additional 510 new HKD Impulse and Phazer R5 tower guns will be installed. This will more than double the total number of fixed tower snow guns between Killington and Pico, an unprecedented increase in equipment.

The new snow guns will allow for a significant reduction in electricity, diesel fuel an, labour cost while also reducing 5,818,850 pounds of carbon emissions per year.

Locations of the new and replacement guns this season include Cruise Control, Upper and Lower Needle’s Eye, Outer Limits, Alpine Training Venue, Upper Header, Timberline, Upper and Lower Great Eastern, Blue Heaven, Bear Trax, Skyeburst, Upper Bittersweet, Panic Button and Superstar. Forty-four tower guns will also be installed at Pico Mountain on 49er, Swinger, Ace of Clubs, Upper and Lower Pike. Next season guns will be added to Cascade, Middle Chute, Lower Dreammaker, Lower Downdraft, Lower East Fall, Easy Street, Bear Cub, Great Northern, Highline, Upper and Lower High Road, Kilink, Launch Pad, Mouse Run and Mouse Trap. Upper Pipe Dream, Northbrook Trail, Snowshed Crossover, Upper and Lower Skyelark, Spillway, Snowshed Slope, The Stash, Upper and Lower Wildfire and Upper Yodeler.

In addition to the new equipment, Killington Resort will transition to a new control and hydrant tracking system for the 2025/26 season, HKD ISno and HKD’s hydrant tracker, to monitor production, automate controls and ensure maximum efficiency of the entire system at both Killington and Pico.

Killington Resort has partnered with Efficiency Vermont and Green Mountain Power to undertake this sizable project and once completed, the resort will have 1,695 total tower guns and 764 'portable' guns for a total arsenal of 2,459 snow guns to service 3,500 sets of hydrants between both mountains, bringing the percentage of hydrants with fixed tower guns to 48%.