Ski areas struggle to stay covered

Fighting Mother Nature is only half the battle for ski-area owners like Max DeWardner at Yawgoo Valley in Exeter during this warm, dry winter. Persuading people to think about skiing when they have hardly seen frost this year, let alone snow, is nearly as difficult.
“It took us 20 years to convince people we can make our own snow,” DeWardner said Jan. 3, when a brief plunge in temperatures triggered a full barrage from Yawgoo’s snow-making guns.
“Now we need to convince people that man-made snow is five times more dense than natural snow and fairly impervious to warm weather,” he said. “This will not shut us down.”
After enjoying epic snowfall that made activities other than skiing difficult a year ago, New England ski areas have seen the tables turned so far this winter and are fighting to stay frozen.
Now well into the ski season, most mountains are weeks, if not more, behind last year’s pace of opening skiable terrain, which directly impacts their number of paying customers and bottom line.
Last year at Yawgoo, the only downhill ski area in Rhode Island, all 12 trails and the tubing park were open before Christmas.
This year, while there has been skiing since Dec. 26, the area’s snow-making crews were still working feverishly to get the tubing park and most of the ski trails open last week.
On Dec. 26, 2010, Yawgoo had 300 people working, 100 of them full time. One year later, there were 50 people working during the same period the week before Christmas.
DeWardner expects to finally be at that peak seasonal employment of 300 this week.
At Blue Hills Ski Area in Canton, Mass., which opened in mid-December last year, only two of a dozen trails were open as of Jan 3.
“It’s frustrating,” said Jennifer Heinen, manager at Blue Hills. “We get calls from people who want to come and ski and it has been a challenge for us to provide it.” On top of having fewer trails to ski, the lack of snow and warm weather creates a barrier to many people even thinking of skiing as a possibility.
“They see it’s warm and they don’t see any snow in their backyard and they don’t think of skiing,” Heinen said.
Still, managers at both ski areas say, while they may not meet last year’s sales, or that of the nearly-as-good 2009-2010 winter, there is enough time left in the ski season to come close if temperatures get low enough for snow makers to cover the mountain.
“We plan on making snow around the clock and hopefully we can make enough,” Heinen said.
During last year’s run of frigid, snowy storms, Yawgoo saw 50,000 skiing visits and 25,000 tubing-park visits for the season.
DeWardner wouldn’t say how far off that pace the area is now, but said it was not an impossible amount to make up.
“Could we make it up? I am not sure: it all depends on March,” DeWardner said.
While it won’t make the conditions this winter look any better, the fact that New England ski areas are coming off of not one, but two, cold and snowy winters relieves some of the pressure on this year’s slow start.
“Last year was a record-breaker and the year before that was a record-breaker,” DeWardner said, noting that Yawgoo has weathered worse weather in its 48-year history.
Heinen said business at Blue Hills last winter rose 50 percent above an average year.
According to the National Weather Service station in Taunton, both November and December had the fourth-highest average temperatures in Providence since they started keeping records in 1905. And December had the second-lowest snowfall in that time. Temperature records at the Blue Hill Meteorological Observatory, which is on the same hill as the ski area, go back even further, to 1885, and in that time December 2011 ranks second warmest all-time, behind 2006.
With two warm days to start January and another relatively mild period after the brief Jan. 2 cold snap, this month may not do too much to reverse the trend.
Weather experts generally attribute the warm winter to patterns in the North Atlantic oscillation and a shifting of air pressure in the Arctic.
When the oscillation is positive and pressure in the Arctic is low, the jet stream tends to be strong and stay north, keeping warmer air trapped over the Northeast.
According to Mike Halpert, deputy director at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center in Washington, D.C., the oscillation in December was decidedly positive, the second-most positive ever recorded, while last December’s was the second-most negative recorded.
While the oscillation can change dramatically within a season, Halpert said there doesn’t appear to be much more than a shift toward a more neutral oscillation in mid-January.
Although clearly not ideal, the timing of the recent warm spell is not as bad as it could be for ski areas.
Worse are the years in which cold, early seasons with good natural snow give way to shock January heat waves that literally wash away the base of snow that’s been built up.
DeWardner said the worst he remembers is 1996-1997, when skiers were confronted with streams of water flowing down mountains at the height of the ski season.
DeWardner said the last few years of alternately amazing and disappointing weather have confirmed a pattern he has seen in New England over 48 years: “You never get three in a row.” •

No posts to display