The elevator effect

By KATY SAVAGE
Special to the Eagle Times
Navigating the weather continues to be an up-and-down elevator ride for area ski resorts, who say sudden warm weather meeting with cold has impacted their visitors — and their budgets.

While Presidents Day week is usually one of the busiest weeks for resorts, a 60-degree day at the start took a toll that several say they were unable to recover from.

Arrowhead Recreation Area in Claremont shut down. Several groups scheduled to come were canceled due to a lack of snow.

President Chuck Allen said the warm day threw off what he had hoped to be a good week.

“If we didn’t have that one day, then everything would have held up fine,” Allen said..

Although it snowed the following day, it was still too warm for some resorts to start making snow.

Magic Mountain President Geoff Hatheway said the mountain had just 10 trails open, which was down from 40 trails last season.

Mount Sunapee had 49 of 66 trails open, while Okemo Mountain Resort had 89 of 121 trails open.

“It’s been a challenging season,” said Bonnie MacPherson, Okemo’s director of public relations. “It’s been a little bit of a roller coaster ride with some of the weather patterns. The extreme cold temperatures and thaws have been dramatic.”

Resorts don’t divulge how many visitors they serve but MacPherson said this season is “on par” with where Okemo was last year, but not where the resort would like to be.

 “We like to see a little better results each year,” she said. 

Magic Mountain’s visitors were down around 50 percent, while Sunapee’s director of marketing, Megan Burch, also said visitors were down.

Burch said resorts depend on holiday weeks. When temperatures don’t cooperate, it hurts.

“In the ski industry, the holidays are when you need to see skiers to make your budget,” she said.

While temperatures were below zero during the Christmas holiday week, temperatures during President’s Day week were too warm for some resorts to make snow.

Burch said it needs to be around 28 degrees at night to make snow at Sunapee and no higher than 30 degrees in the day.

“If you make snow at night and then it melts, there’s not a whole lot of purpose to it,” she said.

Sunapee had no plans to make snow but Burch said the resort is constantly re-evaluating the weather.

Ski resorts are adjusting to the challenges.

Arrowhead has gone through around 700,000 gallons of water so far this season, which is up about one third from last year, said Allen, while Magic has gone through 10 million more gallons.

Sunapee uses around 150 million gallons of water a year to make snow. Jay Gamble, the resort’s vice president and general manager, said that number hasn’t fluctuated. He explained that Sunapee makes most of its snow the first month of winter. Okemo uses 350 million to 450 million gallons of water in an average winter. MacPherson said the mountain expects to use the same this season.

Okemo has a sophisticated snow-making system that allows the resort to make snow more efficiently at warmer temperatures. Okemo has the most trails open in the east. 

Though the week was disappointing, resort operators remained optimistic for the remaining months of the season. MacPherson compared maintaining a ski resort to farming.

“We’re a little like farmers in that we’ve very optimistic going into the season and we think, ‘this is going to be the best crop ever,’” she said. When challenges arise, “you just have to adapt and start planning for the next crop (the next season).”