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concentrated well-defined beam, simi-lar
to a flashlight. Using a duel beam or
“stereo” installation, there should be
sufficient overlap to provide visual cov-erage
over an intended target. This may
work well for driving down a roadway,
but it is not ideal for grooming a wide
area in multiple passes. One missed
line can leave “crud,” grooves and
chunks of snow that can be dangerous
for skiers and riders.
Figure 1: Conventional headlamps
project beams of light that usually
generate a “V” formation
As Figure 1 illustrates, conventional
headlamps project beams of light that
usually generate a “V” formation. For
roadway lighting, the objective is to
provide an overlapping configuration
that appropriately illuminates in ad-vance
of the vehicle to reveal road con-tour
and any obstacles.
Groomers understand that they
must deal with a much wider area with
less defined edges that would normally
be associated with a roadway shoulder.
Moreover, since slopes vary in their de-gree
of pitch, lighting must be directed
to meet the snow surface at an angle
that does not bounce light back at the
operator’s cabin, but instead disperses
along the downward plane. Since a
snow-cat deals with wide swaths of
surface with each pass, the ideal light-ing
situation would be a uniform field
of intensity that reveals all features
without glare or variation. It is easy to
see how conventional beams produced
by headlamps can leave a void if a solid
intersection of the “V” pattern is not
projected.
To address the basic lighting chal-lenge,
many groomers have resorted to
a multi-fixture light bar that uses sev-eral
lamps in a spread to create a solid
overlap. Many of the new configura-tions
use an LED array. Although this
approach reduces lighting voids ahead
of the snow-cat, it still projects illumi-nation
forward, leaving insufficient
light within the grooming target. This
becomes more of a problem when it is
snowing or snowmaking is in progress
LIGHTING
– light refraction from the falling snow
interferes with visual perception of the
snow surface.
Areas that have night lighting of-ten
supplement by keeping fixtures
on during grooming. This provides a
comprehensive perspective, but does
not necessarily give an accurate visu-al
reference directly ahead of the cat.
An interesting solution has material-ized
from mountains that have imple-mented
wide area Snow-Bright™ light-ing
from Ultra-Tech™ Lighting. Areas
like Steamboat Springs in Colorado
and Mt. Peter in New York have experi-enced
more accurate nighttime groom-ing
when illuminating slopes because
the Snow-Bright™ spectrum is specifi-cally
matched to the reflective and re-fractive
indices of snow. This raised
the prospect of installing Snow-Bright™
fixtures directly onto cats to achieve
a higher visual acuity, which leads to
greater grooming accuracy.
Snow-Bright™ comes in lightweight
60-watt and 150-watt models, making it
snowopsmag.com | SnowOps 31