Friday, January 19, 2007
Finally, skiers and resorts hail the arrival of cold weather
Mark Taylor
Mark Taylor's Outdoors column and notebook appears regularly in The Roanoke Times.
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As the assistant manager for the ski area at Massanutten Resort near Harrisonburg, Kenny Hess has watched helplessly this winter as warm temperatures have unrelentingly attacked what meager amounts of snow the resort managed to lay down on its slopes
Closed for skiing since early January — but doing a booming golf business — things were finally looking up for Massanutten when another problem surfaced.
Just when temperatures got cold enough to allow for snowmaking, a broken municipal pipe caused a sewage spill into the pond from which the resort pulls water for its snowmaking operation.
“It’s like getting kicked when you’re down,” Hess said Thursday, adding that the resort planed to begin snowmaking as soon as the water tested clean.
After a tough start, things are finally looking up for ski resorts in the Mid-Atlantic.
Cold air has allowed resorts to kick snowmaking operations into overdrive. Some of the mountains have even benefitted from natural snowfall, although season totals remain well below average.
Forecasts call for temperatures across the East to remain below normal through the end of the month.
The arrival of cold weather is a relief for resorts and skiers who have suffered through a frustrating year.
“One of our club members flew over Wintergreen and it was just brown,” said Bill Howard, president of the Roanoke Ski Club.
The club had planned for a day trip on Wednesday to Snowshoe Mountain in Pocahontas County, W.Va., but cancelled the trip early in the week.
“The kinds of runs that we’d like to take were all closed,” said Debbie Richards of Roanoke, whose husband, Pat, was to be the bus trip’s leader. “We were all bummed.”
Not all skiers from the region have been disappointed with their season.
The Roanoke club recently sent 40 members on a week-long trip to Colorado. The day the skiers took off, temperatures got into the 60s in Roanoke.
“We got to Aspen and they had just gotten 12 inches of fresh snow,” said Laurie Goater, the trip’s leader.
Throughout the week, the skiers enjoyed epic conditions. The only downside was the long bus ride required to leave because yet another storm had closed the Aspen airport on the departure day.
Even if conditions at Southeastern resorts turn from dismal to great over the next couple of weeks, resorts will have a hard time making up for the business they lost early in the season, especially the normally busy Christmas and Martin Luther King Jr. holidays.
Hess, who estimated Massanutten’s skier visits were down by 50 percent over last year, would love to see a winter storm hit the region. A storm would not only help put more snow on the slopes, but would help get people in the skiing mood.
“Hopefully we’ll get a snowstorm and actually get people thinking about winter,” he said.
Even if conditions remain great into March, ski resorts have trouble making up for slow starts to seasons.
“We usually run out of skiers before we run out of snow,” Hess said.
