LET IT SNOW - IN THE DESERT BURBANK COMPANY MAKES OIL-RICH CITY WINTER WONDERLAND, INCLUDING SKI SLOPE.

Byline: Brent Hopkins Staff Writer

BURBANK - Building a ski slope in the desert sounded like the ultimate snow job, so Craig Hanna gladly took the challenge.

Two years ago, the owner of the United Arab Emirates' largest mall approached Burbank-based Thinkwell Design & Production with a novel project: help bring snow Nto Dubai. Hanna, chief creative officer of the amusement park designer, considered the oil-rich city's litany of gonzo constructions - a man-made island shaped like a palm tree, an underwater hotel and concert hall, as well as a slew of edifices that claim the title of ``world's largest'' - and signed on.

``Our first thought was this is a pretty crazy idea,'' Hanna said. ``But we like crazy ideas. We had a lot to learn about how to do something like this in a warm climate. There was no real way of knowing how big this thing was really going to be.''

The end result, the recently opened Ski Dubai, is not the first, nor is it the largest indoor ski slope in the world. For the time being, however, it is definitely the most unusual.

In a city where the temperature regularly tops 100 degrees, Ski Dubai boasts a 2-foot-deep snowpack. Chilled to 28 degrees and covering 240,000 square feet, the park's centerpiece is a 25-story slope that measures 1,320 feet in length.

As a result, not far from some of Islam's holiest sites in Saudi Arabia, visitors can now have breakfast with Santa Claus.

Thinkwell's role was to provide overall art direction and to design the 30,000-square-foot snow park that provides a play area for those unwilling to hurdle down the slopes. A team of 12 designed toboggan runs, slides, an ice cavern and a snowball shooting gallery.

``We were hesitating to take it, something in an unknown country, far away from our offices,'' said Victor Cavaller, general manager of Thinkwell's Barcelona bureau, which handled much of the work. ``We couldn't go wrong. We had expertise in play experiences, but nothing with snow.''

To produce the snowfall, machines shoot atomized water into the air to create a cloud that hovers atop the domed expanse. Tiny ice particles filter into the cloud, forming snow crystals that sprinkle down onto the park below. A chemical coating on the ice cavern creates thousands of crystals that reflect brilliant blue light around an elaborate dragon sculpture.

Early reviews for the park, which opened to the public at the beginning of the month, adopt a baffled yet impressed tone.

``Central to this snapshot of wintry perfection are two Emiratis in white robes and checkered head scarves kneeling in eight inches of powder, letting snow run through their fingers and giggling at the sheer frigid insanity of it all,'' wrote Rob Orchard and Marcus Webb in a travel piece in the British magazine The Observer. ``Even in this endlessly ambitious town, taking temperatures of up to 45 degrees Celsius down to below zero seemed crazy. But this is a city that refuses to be confined by such trifling matters as logic, physics or geography.''

Even after two years on the job, Hanna seems equally bemused. When he visited the park six weeks before it opened, the temperature was 55 degrees Fahrenheit on ground level, but still 102 up top. While guests dressed in snow suits frolic in the powder, shoppers in desert attire peer in through 50-foot-tall plate-glass windows.

The strange blend of natural splendor and highly-manufactured fake reality doesn't even seem out of place anymore to Hanna, who studied real snowscapes by driving to Mount Baldy with his children. To get the final effect, Thinkwell flipped on machines, then let what passed for nature take over.

``If we'd hired a designer to make this, we couldn't have done it so intricately,'' Hanna said. ``With the ice, we didn't really know what would happen, but you look up and see those delicate crystals by the thousands and say, my god, this is amazing.''

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Photo:

(1 -- color) The recently opened Ski Dubai boasts a 2-foot-deep snowpack. Chilled to 28 degrees and covering 240,000 square feet, the park's centerpiece is a 25-story slope that measures 1,320 feet in length.

(2 -- color) Thinkwell's role was to provide overall art direction and to design the 30,000-square-foot snow park that provides a play area for those unwilling to hurdle down the slopes.