Aspen's Secret Weapon for October Skiing: Last Winter's Snow

This weekend, skiers and riders at Snowmass won't be skiing on the first snow of the season. They'll be skiing on the last snow of the last one.

Aspen Snowmass is opening the Makaha Terrain Park for a free rail session on October 3 and 4, built entirely on snow that was piled up, insulated and tucked away back in April — then left to sit through a long, warm Colorado summer. The event marks the payoff of a pilot program the resort ran this year with Snow Secure, a Finnish company whose insulating blankets have already reshaped the opening-day odds for ski areas thousands of miles away.

How you keep snow frozen through a 90-degree summer

The technology itself is almost deceptively low-tech. Mountain operations crews gather leftover snowpack into a large pile — a process that itself takes anywhere from a few days to a couple of weeks — then cover it with a blanket made of thick sheets of extruded polystyrene, the same material commonly used to insulate Scandinavian homes. The blankets unfold like an accordion and can be laid over a pile in about a day. Real-time sensors tucked under the covers typically show temperatures staying below 35 degrees Fahrenheit, even when the air above climbs past 100.

Aspen used the blankets at both Snowmass and Buttermilk this year; the Buttermilk pile remains covered for now, according to the Aspen Times. Snow Secure said in a release that the Aspen Snowmass trial preserved 85 percent of the snow's volume, measured as of August 31 — a notably strong result, since even well-run operations elsewhere report losing closer to 20 to 30 percent of stored volume over a season, with older, non-insulated storage methods historically losing closer to half.

Aspen Snowmass's event page framed the rail jam as a celebration of that success, and teased more to come: "in the future, these snow blankets will cover more snow to use in service of early season skiing."

Borrowed from a Finnish resort with no room for error

Snow Secure didn't invent snow storage — stockpiling snow and ice dates back to ancient Persia — but it industrialized it. The company was founded in 2000 and began fabricating its blankets in 2014, initially working with two Finnish resorts, Levi and Ruka. Levi had a specific problem to solve: in 2016, after a run of early-season World Cup races were canceled for lack of snow, FIS gave the resort a final warning. Levi turned to Snow Secure, stored just 30,000 cubic meters of snow in its first year, and has since built up to storing around 250,000 cubic meters in a typical year, with losses now down to between 10 and 20 percent, compared with roughly 30 to 50 percent under its older covering methods. This past November, that stored snow underpinned the women's World Cup slalom opener at Levi, letting Mikaela Shiffrin race on what organizers described as entirely recycled snow.

Levi has invested roughly €1 million in the approach since 2019. The company has since fabricated its blankets to standardized, shipping-container-ready sizes specifically so the system could travel. It has: Sun Peaks in British Columbia has already adopted it, and Snow Secure's leadership has said North America is now a deliberate focus, with Tyrol Basin in Wisconsin, Ski Apache in New Mexico and Soldier Hollow in Utah — a 2034 Winter Olympics Nordic venue — all lined up to store snow using the system this coming spring.

Not a fix for climate change, but a hedge against it

No one running these programs is pretending the blankets solve warming winters. They're being pitched, more modestly, as a tool that helps resorts hit their advertised opening days regardless of what November decides to do — valuable given how costly and reputation-damaging a delayed opening can be, and useful insurance even in a year when conditions might otherwise cooperate.

Aspen Snowmass is still pointing to conventional snowmaking and natural accumulation for most of its season: Aspen Mountain and Snowmass are scheduled to open for the regular 2026-27 winter season on November 26, with Aspen Highlands and Buttermilk following on December 12. This weekend's rail jam is a preview, not the season itself — a one-off demonstration that the summer-long experiment worked, ahead of a winter where the mountain will lean on both the sky and the freezer.

Elsewhere this weekend, Wisconsin's Trollhaugen is holding its own long-running early-season tradition, the Open Haugen rail jam — a reminder that manufactured, stored and farmed snow are increasingly just part of how the rail-jam calendar gets built at all, not a Colorado-only curiosity.