Chance of snow slide will be 100% at park

The Atlanta-area weather forecast for New Year’s Eve 2008: a snow shower —- an extremely isolated one.

Stone Mountain Park is creating Snow Mountain, officials announced Tuesday. For two months, the lawn where people usually watch the park’s laser show will be a glistening expanse of snow made of water drawn from the park’s lake.

On Dec. 31, park-goers will have the chance to jump on an inner tube and go skipping down a 400-foot slope of manufactured snow. The attraction will remain open through March 1.

For two months, said Gerald Rakestraw, the park’s vice president and general manager, Stone Mountain will be as close to a ski slope as anyone will find in metro Atlanta.

“No one that we have been able to find has done an attraction the way we are doing it,” he said.

It’s an improvement over the plan Stone Mountain offered last year, when officials announced they would draw water from DeKalb County’s public water supplies to create the snow. Critics pointed out the region was in a drought; taking water from public reserves, they said, was wasteful. Stone Mountain dropped the plan.

The resurrected Snow Mountain will use water from Stone Mountain Lake, which is not part of DeKalb’s public reserves. The park anticipates drawing about 3 million to 4 million gallons of water to create a 2-foot base of snow. The treated water —- Rakestraw called it “swimming-pool quality” —- will be frozen with snow-making machinery and sprayed across the lawn behind Memorial Hall. The tract, a grassy expanse nearly 200 feet wide, will be divided into 11 snow-tubing lanes.

Tickets are $25, or $15 for park members, regardless of age. A Snow Mountain ticket buys participants two hours of tubing time. The attraction also will have a 30,000-square-foot play area for children, which has no time limits for use.

“You can go tubing for two hours, get some hot chocolate, and then the kids can play [in the play area] as long as they want,” Rakestraw said.

The water-circulation and treatment system cost about $5 million, Rakestraw said. Engineers estimated it will take 200 tons of snow to cover the lawn —- about a half-inch drop in the water level of the 350-acre lake. The water will be recirculated as it melts, meaning the same water can be used to make snow. The snow-making is scheduled to begin the day after Thanksgiving and continue until opening day.

With a substantial base of snow, Rakestraw is not worried that a warm Georgia afternoon will turn the attraction into Slush Mountain. “We’ll add snow to it when we need it,” he said.

Snow Mountain will be open from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. For more information, visit www.snowmountainpark.com.