Vail Resorts Inc., one of the largest financial contributors to Colorado’s cloud seeding program, has dropped out this year, leaving a major hole in the program’s budget.

Cloud-seeding machines strategically positioned in Colorado’s high country have been aimed at the sky for four decades, spewing a compound called silver iodide into the clouds to try to make it snow.

Skeptics have been plenty and definitive research was elusive — it’s hard to prove exactly how much more snow falls after clouds are seeded when no one can say for sure what Mother Nature had planned on her own.
 

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