whale
n.— «“Whale” season is in full swing up in Colorado’s high country, as the state’s ski resorts pump thousands of gallons of water through snowmaking equipment to create autumn’s signature-shaped piles of artificial snow.…“We’ve been blowing it into whales in the shady parts of the mountain, especially on top where it doesn’t warm up too much.”…Taking advantage of the colder overnight temperatures in the preseason, resorts direct snowmaking guns to shoot whale-shaped piles of snow in shady areas, then use Snowcat grooming equipment to distribute the snow across the trails.» —“Colo. ski resort snow guns having a ‘whale’ of a time” by Michelle Mahoney Denver Post (Colorado) Oct. 12, 1993. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Samantha Harvey’s novel Orbital is a sensuous, exhilarating meditation about the strangeness of life on a space station, with its mix of tedious tasks and jaw-dropping views. And: a musician who rode the rails in his youth shares the slang he...
A member of the ski patrol at Vermont’s Sugarbush Resort shares some workplace slang. Boilerplate denotes hard-packed snow with a ruffled pattern that makes skis chatter, death cookies are random chunks that could cause an accident, and...