Snow Trails Heads Into Its 66th Winter With New Chairs, New Snow Guns and a New Tubing Building

Snow Trails doesn't wait for winter to arrive. It manufactures it. Heading into its 66th season, the Possum Run Valley resort has rolled out another round of off-season upgrades aimed at the same goal that's defined it for decades: open early, open fully, and keep it that way through a Midwest winter that can't always be trusted to cooperate.

The resort, located near Mansfield and billed as Ohio's first commercial ski area, announced its 2026-27 improvement list in September. The work touches nearly every part of the operation — lifts, snowmaking, grooming, tubing, parking and rental gear — but the two headline items are a pair of chairlift overhauls and another expansion of the snowmaking system that's become Snow Trails' signature.

Two lifts, two different jobs

The Alpine Triple is getting entirely new chairs, aimed squarely at structural support and ride comfort — the kind of unglamorous mechanical upgrade that doesn't show up in trail-map marketing but matters every single lift cycle.

The Silver Triple's upgrade is more visible after dark. New tower tops are being installed specifically to hold bright LED lighting, alongside an updated communication system between the lift and mountain operations. For a resort that leans heavily on night skiing, lift-line lighting isn't cosmetic. Both the Silver and Alpine lifts are also getting fresh paint, and the broader lift fleet is getting the kind of routine maintenance that Snow Trails frames as making sure "every lift is ready to run smoothly and safely this winter."

More guns aimed at specific trails

Snowmaking remains the resort's core investment, and this year's additions are targeted rather than broad. New SMI Grizzly snowmakers — tower-mounted units — are going in dedicated specifically to Silver Bullet Trail, while Possum Trail gets an additional SMI tower-mounted gun of its own. Ten existing tower guns are being rebuilt and brought back into service rather than replaced outright.

That's on top of a pattern Snow Trails has kept up for years. Ahead of the 2025-26 season, the resort added five new snow guns after adding nine the year before that — a two-year total of 14 new machines before this year's installations. The resort has previously pointed to a commercial-grade cooling tower, which it describes as the only one of its kind in the Midwest, combined with its location in one of the colder valleys in Ohio, as the backbone of its snowmaking edge. That edge has shown up in results before: in December 2024, Snow Trails opened with 100 percent of its 21 trails running, something it credited to 127 straight hours of snowmaking.

Everything else: tubing, parking, and paint

The resort's tubing operation is getting a dedicated new building — a single structure combining the ticket window, restrooms, offices and snow tube storage that are currently more scattered, alongside electrical upgrades to wiring and select system components. The Rental Center parking lot is getting an additional paved and striped section, aimed at improving visibility and organization, continuing a project the resort also worked on last year. Thirty older slope lights are being swapped for LED fixtures across select slope areas, and the resort says it is continuing to refresh its rental ski and snowboard fleet, as it does most years.

The grooming fleet gets a lower-key mention: ongoing maintenance and parts replacement to keep output consistent, rather than a specific new machine this cycle — a contrast to last season, when Snow Trails added a new Pisten Bully 400 ParkPro groomer.

A pattern, not a one-off

None of this is new behavior for Snow Trails. The resort added Ohio's first ski-area rope tow in 2024, remodeled its cafeteria and paved its rental-center lot the year after that, and has treated snowmaking capacity as a running, multi-year project rather than a single upgrade. Snow Trails' season typically runs from December into March, with snowmaking beginning around Thanksgiving to build a base ahead of opening day. The resort is currently closed for the off-season and expects the 2026-27 season to begin in December, conditions permitting.