Back up north, at a resort called Glenwood Acres (now Kissing Bridge, about thirty minutes from Ellicottville), Bob Crone was struggling to create a machine that would keep trails open, even in the absence of January’s lake effect powder.  Crone rigged up a system that sent water through a pipe with an ample entryway that tapered to a smaller nozzle where the snow was ejected.  At the tip of the gun, the rushing water was hit with 125 pounds of air pressure to emit an expanded ice crystal.  The combination air/water system is still used in Holiday Valley’s snowmaking system, albeit with some major energy saving modifications.

In the summer of 1962, Crone cut a deal with Mecca Farms in Eden, NY that let him borrow some of their irrigation equipment to test out his invention at Glenwood Acres that winter.  They hauled the aluminum pipes 16 miles from Eden in the back of Bob’s pickup and fastened them together with clamps.  Crone, his son Peter, and Bob McCarthy hooked up one end of the pipe to a big gas pump in the creek at the bottom of the mountain.  The creek pump would shoot water halfway up the hill to another apparatus that joined up with an air compressor as big as a school bus.  Another hundred feet or so of pipe would carry the air/water combination to the top of the mountain and snow would shoot out of the nozzle at the end. 

Peter stood at the bottom, Bob at the midstation, and Crone way up at the summit.  Crone gave a wave down the hill and Bob yelled for Pete to throw open the air pipe.  As soon as the 200 pounds of air pressure hit the flimsy aluminum hose, the pipe began to undulate like a snake, rippling up off of the ground and flailing about in the air.  The other pipe, grounded by the water, stayed still.  Over the din of the compressor and the pump chugging together, Bob yelled at Peter to shut it down.  Before he got the message, the air pipe exploded out of its sockets and flew through the air, scaring the hell out of everyone on the T Bar.

Five years later, after the minor glitches had been worked out, Bob Crone came to Holiday Valley and gave them the plans for his system for free, sketched out on a brown paper lunch sack.  That was how he operated; never seeking any patents, just giving away his ideas for free.  Incidentally, that’s how Bob McCarthy operated, too.  Always giving things away, doing stuff for free.  When I was a kid, he got up the idea to make a little pine house for our golden retriever, Toby.   When he dropped it off, he wouldn’t take a cent for it, not even to cover the cost of the materials.