No business like snow business

Mt Buller is the ski resort that is the closest to Melbourne, a three-hour, 250km easy drive. Up to 30 per cent of all guest nights spent up at Victorian ski resorts are at Mt Buller.

But the question we have to ask our selves is will we be enjoying nature’s winter wonderland landscape for much longer at ski resorts like Mt Buller or will it become increasingly like a Gold Coast theme park? A “cool” version of “Wet 'n' Wild”? Or another Poowoomba.

The top of the summit of Mt Buller is at 1,804m above sea level while the resort village where ski enthusiasts stay is situated at 1,375m, which is below the natural snow level for most of the two last snow seasons.

The Mt Buller & Mt Stirling Resort Management Board was formed in 2004 and manages a Crown Reserve of 2,300 hectares of which the ski-able area is 270 hectares. The ski-able area also covers 70 hectares of artificial snow making facilities which has been used increasingly during the last ski seasons to prop up the lack of natural snow. Assets, not including frozen ones, amount to $70 million with an annual turnover of $7 million.

According to the 2005 Annual Report of the Resort Board a significant increase in private investment activity saw completion and commencement of projects to the value of $12.5 million.

Mt Buller caters for up to 300,000 long-term and 500,000 short-term winter visitors that are attracted to the area because of one feature - frozen water. And this feature is increasingly man-made.

In terms of infrastructure services, the board provides such things as water, sewerage, snowmaking water, gas, roads and parking. The fees collected from visitors to the mountain go some way to cover these expenses and are spent on the infrastructure that is needed to accommodate the diehard skiers and ice and snow aficionados among us.

However , the snow drought of the last year poses the question: is Mt Buller in fact the Victorian equivalent to Toowoomba in Queensland?

Both towns straddle the Great Dividing Range and have turned to recycling of water as a technological fix to the shortage of water. But Mt Buller folks aren’t supposed to drink the recycled sewerage. Not directly anyhow.

In the winter season of 2004 206Ml were used for artificial snow making while 165Ml were used for domestic uses. More interesting is that the trend for water consumption is up. The change from the 2003 winter season is staggering: up 148 per cent for snowmaking while domestic use increased 21 per cent.

Since the Victorian High Country has had a prolonged drought for the last eight years, with dramatic falls in levels in nearby, but unreachable, reservoirs like Lake Eildon, this is clearly not a sustainable situation in the short or long-term.

The debatable solution to these woes is the Mt Buller water recycling project that will provide all the water needed for snowmaking and hopefully will extend the skiing season. An application to develop this recycled water scheme was approved in February 2005 by the Victorian Environment Protection Authority.

The Victorian Government Water Trust has so far granted $1 million for the commencement of the effluent recycling scheme and provided $1 million as a loan to finance the scheme.

In total the project is expected to cost $3.5 million and is well on the way. The main works at the Mt Buller sewerage farm will be completed by the end of 2006. The recycling system will then be tested and the operations and quality of water monitored during the ski season of 2007 before it goes on line in 2008.

The present State Government-issued water licence, which allows pumping of water from the local Boggy Creek catchment, is restricted to 3Ml a day and 700Ml a year.

Water is pumped uphill from Boggy Creek, which is at 1,450m above sea level, through different middle stations to the Sun Valley dam at 1,710m above sea level. The Sun Valley reservoir, the snowmaking water storage, with a capacity of 70Ml has been 3-4m below normal levels for most parts of this season. Domestic water is diverted off from this scheme.

The snowmaking infrastructure and knowhow is provided by the Buller Ski Lifts, a private company owned by the Melbourne builder-developer Rino Grollo since 1992.

The outcomes of this investment in snowmaking infrastructure is the development of Mt Buller as a tourism destination over the last decade and as a plant school for a whole generation of professional skiers such as world champion Kirstie Marshall, the present Australian Labour Party backbencher and Victorian MLA, as well as Olympic champions Jacqui Cooper and Alisa Camplin.

Perhaps the crowning glory of the development of Mt Buller as a ski resort was the opening in 1997 of the La Trobe University campus catering to students interested in a career in ski tourism and hospitality. But La Trobe University is considering closing this campus at the end of this year and this year’s international aerial ski competition has been cancelled due to lack of snow.

The real problem in a snow drought is the lack of water for snowmaking. The Mount Buller snow making system can theoretically convert 720,000 litres of water to snow every hour. The Buller Ski Lifts Company use on average 1.3Ml, or more than 40 per cent of the daily cap on water drawn from Boggy Creek, for this purpose.

A simple calculation makes it clear that the entire daily 3Ml allowance of water is only enough for four hours of snowmaking each day under ideal conditions. During the four hours of operation about 7,000 cubic metres of man-made snow is created. This is only enough to cover 2.3 hectares of the 70 hectares of artificial snowmaking area to a depth of 30cm.

However, not all the snow melts away during the day so the man-made snow accumulates on the slopes. This frozen asset is underpinning the millions of dollars in private investments of the Mount Buller Ski Lifts Company as well as the developers of the ski chalets that line the snow clad ski slopes of Mount Buller.

Unlike Toowoomba the Mt Buller scheme is not up for a public referendum and will be completed in 2006-2007. The recycled water is not for domestic use, at least not immediately. It is crucially important for the whole Victorian High Country tourism economy and has got funding from and the political backing of the Bracks Government.

The recycling scheme will provide an additional 2Ml of Class A recycled water that is equally safe for use on irrigation for food crops and safe to spread on the ski slopes according to the Victorian Environmental Protection Agency.

The sewerage will be collected at the Mt Buller sewerage treatment plant, and after filtering and UV treatment , pumped 140m uphill to the Sun Valley dam topping up the snowmaking reservoir with an additional source of water that will allow for additional snowmaking capacity.

This also in principle closes the water cycle on top of the Mountain since the water collected up at Mt Buller stays on the slopes in the form of snow and when it melts most of the runoff goes back into the Boggy Creek catchment which is pumped back up to the snowmaking reservoir and so on. It potentially deprives the Howqua and Delatite Rivers of the run off. These two rivers feed the drying up Lake Eildon Reservoir.

If we set aside the increased potential for a reduction of runoff water from the ski slopes of Mt Buller into the parched dams at the bottom of the mountain, any public concerns about skiing on snow from recycled sewerage should be tempered by the knowledge that the snow already contains added substances of a biological origin such as Snowmax. This proprietary ice nucleation protein derived from Pseudomonas syringae strain 31a: a plant pathogen that causes frost damage on crop plants and was developed for its use in artificial snowmaking back in the late ’80s. It has received regulatory clearance for this use in Australia, New Zealand, North America and in Europe.

Up in the Victorian Alps there is truly “no business like snow business”. It literally forms the semi-solid foundation on which the whole thriving multimillion dollar tourism economy rests. But it is a slippery slope in years of snow drought. Any skiing in the future in ski resorts like Mt Buller is increasingly likely to be done on recycled sewerage containing artificially added bacteria or bacterial products.

Most skiers and visitors to the snow fields surely don’t mind. The snow looks real, feels real, and probably tastes real. However for the environmental sensitive skier there perhaps should be warnings on the slopes pointing out that the snow is artificial and an ingredient list of the "snow" enclosed on the lift ticket.

As Frank Zappa said in the well known song about the Eskimo boy Nannook: “Watch up where those huskies go - and don’t you eat that yellow snow.”