BACKGROUND PHOTO: Several skiers make their way out onto the trails last winter at Meissner Sno-park west of Bend.

Virginia Meissner Sno-park has been packed with skiers this winter — and many of those skiers have been quite generous.

Meissner Nordic, the nonprofit club that grooms ski trails at the sno-park west of Bend, raised enough in donations this winter to purchase a new snowcat for grooming the skate and classic ski trails.

“In terms of the number of donation inquiries we get via phone, email or social media, we’re seeing roughly double than what we’ve seen in previous years,” said Steve Roti, Meissner Nordic president. “People have been very generous this year, which is what allowed us to purchase the new snowcat.”

The old snowcat was eight years old, and the club was able to trade it in for an upgrade with better technology and fuel efficiency, Roti said.

Skiers at Meissner have been raving about the grooming that the new snowcat has provided since it started being used this past week.

“We’re already seeing better quality grooming on our trails just one week with the new cat,” Roti said. “The new technology on the new cat, people are loving it. People wonder why we didn’t do it sooner. But we couldn’t. This was the year when people donated enough to allow us to do it.”

The snowcat is by far the biggest expense for the club, which grooms the trails six days a week, every day but Mondays. The list price on the new snowcat was $250,000, according to Roti. The club received $85,000 trade-in value on their old cat, so the total out-of-pocket was $165,000.

In researching snowcats, Roti said that Meissner Nordic talked to members of Methow Trails, the largest cross-country trail system in North America, located in the Methow Valley near Winthrop in north-central Washington.

“Their philosophy is buy new, use it for five to 10 years and then trade it in,” Roti said. “So you’re never paying the full price. You’re always getting a trade-in value. We got a good trade-in value on our old cat.”

Roti calculated that the old snowcat depreciated at a rate of $13,000 per year.

“All of our funds go to grooming,” Roti said. “It’s a volunteer-run club, but we do contract with two professional groomers, who run the snowcat for us. So we pay for labor, diesel fuel and maintenance on the snowcat. One year we spent $20,000 just on maintenance.”

The snowcat grooms wide trails for skate skiing and sets tracks for classic skiing simultaneously. The new snowcat has the ability to control the left and right tracks independently, which helps prevent the digging up of snow, and even dirt, on tight corners.

“Before they would be going the same speed and you would get some spinning on sharp corners,” Roti explained. “Before it could actually dig up some dirt on an inside corner if the snow was not that deep.”

Larry Katz, Meissner Nordic operations manager and treasurer, is ecstatic about the new snowcat.

“It’s newer, it’s got better technology and it does a better job of grooming the trails,” Katz said. “It’s more fuel efficient. All those things add up and make it a nice purchase for us.”

Trails at Meissner are scheduled to be groomed six days a week through March 31, per Meissner Nordic’s contract with the Deschutes National Forest.

Recent snowfall has put the trails at Meissner in prime condition, according to Katz.

“They’re really nice,” Katz said. “No more icy skating rink. Just enough snow to get some of the lower trails open again.”