Robin Smith, 70, got his start as a ski instructor at an upstate New York ski hill called Swain Ski Center in the 1970s. He went on to own and run that resort for over 20 years and installed the area’s original snowmaking system. When Intrawest bought Mountain Creek, an urban ski area in New Jersey, in the late 1990s, they called up Smith to run the place and help solve their snowmaking woes.

Smith, now in business development for the Italian snowmaking company TechnoAlpin, has since become one of the ski industry’s most veteran snowmaking consultants and pioneers. He currently lives in Englewood, Colorado. “Robin knows how to look at your snowmaking system and quantify it,” says Dennis Harper, snowmaking manager at Idaho’s Sun Valley ski resort. “He’ll tell you how much snow you need to make and how much it’s going to cost to make your resort run.”

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