I think Texans are taking lessons in Dubai. From the Wall Street Journal (subscriber link):
Mr. Aaron and several investors have ambitious plans to build a 25-story mountain with slopes for year-round, outdoor skiing and snowboarding. Surrounding the mountain will be an “Alpine Village” with chairlifts, ice rinks, a bobsled track, a winter wonder-park for children, a retail center, a 600-room hotel and a convention center. Total cost of the proposed Bearfire Resort: $696 million.
The proposed resort is to be built outside Fort Worth, Texas and relies on a new type of artificial snow called Snowflex:
Paul Hilbig, an avid skier who attended the University of Texas at Arlington, tried out several Snowflex slopes in the United Kingdom in 2005, courtesy of Bearfire investors. At first, he was skeptical of the technology, but he found that it felt remarkably like real snow. “If you were blind, you couldn’t tell if you were skiing on one or the other.”
With global warming, I suppose that some avid skiers should be happy to see the creation of a usable artificial snow. However, the idea of going to the plains of North Texas to get in some good downhill skiing in when the temperature is hovering around 100° F just seems incredibly wrong to me.