ILLUSTRATION BY VERONIKA TIMOKHINA
“We live and die by the 10-day weather forecast,” says Alex Perfect, marketing operations director for Perfect North Slopes. Yes, that’s his real last name, and, yes, Perfect North is his family business—his grandfather and grandmother, Clyde and Ella Mae Perfect, turned 200 acres of stock farm outside of Lawrenceburg into this region’s premiere winter wonderland. That is, once there’s enough snow.
Running a ski area in the lower Midwest, where winters are warming and the terrain is less than mountainous, can be a challenge. But Perfect North has figured out a way to make sure tubers, snowboarders, and skiers have access to the white stuff.
A network of underground pipes cover the hill “like a spiderweb,” says Perfect, carrying water (pumped from the property’s lake) and pressurized air to the snow guns, barrel-shaped fans with a spray nozzle at one end. The nozzle splits the water into droplets and the fan sucks in fresh air, with the pressurized air launching droplets high into the air so they can freeze on the way down. A crew of 10, who check conditions throughout the hill every hour, can manually ad- just how much water and air go through and move them side to side or up and down.
Ahead of Perfect North’s 45th season, improvements to the entire system are underway. “We think we’ll see a 30 percent increase in snow-making capability,” Perfect says. “We’ll be pushing more air and more water up the hill to more guns.” All that new capacity won’t help, though, if conditions aren’t right.
If you remember your basic science, it has to be below 32 degrees to make snow. “As it gets colder and colder, we can make more snow. At 15 to 18 degrees, we can make a ton of snow. As far as natural snow, we’ll take what we can get.”
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