DAY 3 The Writing Inquisition - Man-made snowy snowcaps

I've long held the view that weather is a natural phenomenon created to give boring people something to talk about. Obviously I am excluding myself from that socio group.

My very own Canberra, home of Australia's cold hearted alpine fairies, is regularly hitting -10 celsius at night. The bowl of H2O I leave out for the magpies freezes by a few centimetres every night. Science says water freezes at zero. Science says Canberra is cold. I'm not feeling like this is the way I want to spend my life.

I whinge about the cold fairly regularly. I think it's an unofficial hobby now. And like any self-respecting hobby or thing you love to do, it doesn't pay crap.

One of my top 50 complaints about the weather here relates to the fact there is no snow to show for all the suffering endured. I walk to work through a glacial cloud, through air that has literally frozen in time, and there is no snow. The urban myth is that it's too cold to snow here. There might be some so-called science in that too, but I reserve my judgement until Kim Kardashian tweets about it.

But I have a solution to this.  Hard research shows that tourists flock like seagulls on a chippy to places that have snow-capped mountains. I get it. There are pretty. It's like living in the Disney movie Frozen, or Lord of the Rings, or when the cast of Home and Away go on a school trip to Thredbo.

So why don't we create our own snow-capped mountains? All of the alpine regions make their own snow when mother nature isn't playing ball. Little itsy bitsy Corin Forest have three snowmaking machines.

According to the interweb machine, there are two important components to snowmaking and Canberra has them in abundance; water and cold air. And we're talking below 0 type of cold air. And it gets better. The colder the air, the better the quality and higher the quantity of snow. Which means it'll hang around for months and pay for itself through the tourist dollars.

It's easy to get carried away when
you start with the snowmaking.

It's not that far fetched an idea. Governments regularly control and influence natural resources. Water management of dams, rivers and lakes, windmills, biodiversity conservation, agriculture, fisheries. The while point of managing natural resources is to manage the way in which we interact with natural landscapes. And I want my eyes to interact with some snowcaps on my walk to work. It's really just repurposing water. Sort of.

My local Government loves to commission public art that is dangerously ugly and endlessly disappointing. And I'm fairly sure there isn't a tourist in the universe who would come here to see our bright orange bogong moth behemoth in Tuggeranong. And what do we pay for these public art pieces?

$421,000 - Moth ascending the Capital
$400,000 - Owl
$125,000 - Dinomis Maximus (the orange rotating sculpture in Woden that is moved by the wind)

Since 2006, the Perisher ski resort in the New South Wales alpine region has spent about $22 million improving and expanding their snowmaking system.

It figures that recreating a natural phenomenon don't come cheap. Maybe I'll just have to do it myself. Act locally and all that. Online companies advertise their wares, boasting machines that produce a blizzard of snow just like the snowmakers at ski resorts. I think I've found a new winter hobby.