Recent heavy snowfall has snowboarders and skiers excited to hit the slopes.

Those working at Castle Mountain Ski Resort are among them.

Thanks to a partnership with ATCO, the ski resort was able to add approximately $2 million dollars in upgrades to the mountain.

Sales and Marketing Manager Cole Fawcett says the resort has never had snow makers before, so this is a big change.

"Castle has never had snow making...Ever...We've had one snow gun over the past number of years and we've literally hooked it up to our fire hydrant in the base to make snow in and around the base of our lifts." Fawcett adds "This past summer we had an extensive project that brought snow making to the Huckleberry pod of terrain and up a portion of the main mountain and of course through the base area."

The cost of those upgrades is solely on the resort, as Fawcett says the mountain is not owned by big corporations.

"Those upgrades are huge to us. I don't think a lot of people are privy to the ownership structure of Castle. There are no rich benefactors, there's no one large tycoon that owns the resort. We're owned by over 200 local investors who purchased the assets of the mountain in the mid '90's to avoid it closing."

While snow making takes a huge chunk of the upgrades, they also brought natural gas to the resort, and spent a bit of money renovating the T-Bar Pub.

Those improvements have allowed the resort to make snow over the past couple of weeks in the lower quarter of the mountain, and when combined with nearly 70 centimeters of snow from last weeks storms, Fawcett says the resort is ready to open.

"The start of winter this year is too good to be true, so we're pulling the trigger on an early opening." Fawcett says the resort was open to a sneak peak on November 30, which he says was fantastic. "It was great! Very well received! We weren't able to open all of the terrain as we're still waiting for an influx of staff that are on their way to us, but we got fantastic numbers."

The resort's official opening day is Saturday, December 07.

This is the earliest opening Castle Mountain Resort has had for some time. Fawcett says the last time they had people skiing this early, was back in 2004.

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