New York Ski Resort Uses Explosives To Widen Popular Trail for Next Season

Ever wondered if your favorite ski trail was a result of Mother Nature’s handiwork or if it came to be in some other way?

While some trails are happy, geological accidents, others are literally blown up.

Plattekill Mountain, New York, recently posted videos to its social media accounts showing the process of using explosives to widen a popular ski trail. The ski area contracted an explosives company to help with the operation, which involved drilling into the ground to place hydromite.

Explosives were placed along the narrowest portion of Sundown trail, off the Sunshine Triple Chair at Plattekill, to widen it before the trail makes a left-handed turn down the mountain.

Please enjoy the excellent video of the blast below. Tap or click to watch.

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Blasting is a traditional method of building and maintaining roads, used widely by the timber industry. As ski trails are effectively mountain roadways, they’re also an effective way to modify mountain terrain.

Rather than using the homemade dynamite products of the 19th and 20th centuries, modern blasting technicians use emulsion-based explosives such as hydromite, which uses a blend of ammonium nitrate to provide detonation velocity and gas volume.

Plattekill Mountain sits in the Catskill Mountains, which are composed largely of metamorphosed sedimentary rock, including sandstone, shale, and mudstone. While none of these rocks are particularly ‘hard,’ as far as relative rock hardness goes, blasting is still an efficient way to move large sections of the bedrock here.

Plattekill Mountain boasts a summit at 3,500 ft. and a vertical drop of 1,100 feet. The resort receives an average of 175″ of snowfall per year.

Related: Meet Lizzy Schofield, Arapahoe Basin’s First-Ever Female Ski Patrol Director