Heavenly Mountain Facebook post today (with my bolding): "New week, more terrain. Our teams have been working their tails off and started the week off strong by adding North Bowl and Olympic to the mix in Nevada today. In the afternoon, we dropped the rope on the Face and opened Roundabout, officially beginning ski and ride access back to California Base for the season. Oh yeah, probably worth mentioning we are opening Mott Canyon tomorrow as w."
I am still always impressed by how the Sierra can go from 0 to 80/100% with one big storm cycle.
Gunbarrel and East Bowl were not mentioned. Still I’d guess 2/3 of Heavenly is in good shape now.
On the trail report, Heavenly does have Gunbarrel marked as open. I see they are referring to it as 'The Face'.
Some recent articles regarding low snowfall seasons in the West:
Like a bad snow year, the pandemic's early end to the season will lead to innovation.
www.skimag.com
A History of Bad Ski Seasons Part 1 – Weather
The most recent bad season in terms of weather in the West was in 2017-’18, which was reported to be
one of the driest seasons on record for U.S. ski resorts. Snowfall at ski resorts near Lake Tahoe was down 45 percent compared to the season before, Crested Butte was down 57 percent.
Video: Governor Shows California’s Low Snowpack
Can’t see the video? Click here.
At
Taos Ski Valley, the resort called on local Native Americans to
perform a snow dance, but with no luck. Taos ended the season with only 78 inches of snowfall, a full 60 percent decline from the previous year. And the 2017-’18 season wasn’t an anomaly. Resorts have been recording record warm winters regularly over the past decade.
The 2015-’16 season was dubbed the ‘non-winter’ on the East Coast. The season before that was considered the worst ski season in
Utah’s history, some resorts in Canada didn’t even open, and skiers at
Whistler Blackcomb had to ride trams to mid-mountain just to reach snow.
There is no doubt that the past decade has seen more sad seasons than epic ones, but at the very least, resorts managed to operate because of snowmaking technologies.
Ask any old-timer in the West about the worst season ever, and they’ll likely tell you about the winter of 1976-’77.
At the time, snowmaking was mostly nonexistent, so in 1976, when the ski season arrived, the snow didn’t and ski areas started to feel the heat. As slopes remained starved for snow, Governor Brown of California
declared an official drought. At Whistler,
rental shop employees stood guard in front of rocky patches on the slope, demanding their customers take their skis off and walk down through the rocks.
Colorado was just as bad. Aspen only saw 15 inches of snowfall between Nov. 1st and Dec. 26. In Steamboat, locals shoveled snow from the trees onto the barren slopes. By December, Colorado Senator Haskell urged President Ford to declare Colorado’s high country a disaster area eligible for economic relief, but his plea had the reverse effect when tourists heard the news and began canceling their winter vacations. Crested Butte reported 100 percent lodging cancellations before Christmas, and Telluride and Purgatory didn’t open for the holidays.
The industry had barely begun to recover when it happened again in 1980-’81. As yet another drought left slopes completely parched, resorts started looking for ways to compensate for low snowfall.
Michael Berry, the president of the National Ski Areas Association at the time,
remembers that season as an “epiphany year for the industry in the Rocky Mountain West. There might have been some people saying they didn’t need snowmaking going into that season, but no one—no one—was saying that coming out.”
Result: The Artificial Snow Revolution
Low snow years led to the rise of artificial snow. What will skiing after the pandemic look like?Photo courtesy of Mountain High Resort
After the 1976-’78 and 1980-’81 seasons, the industry evolved. Snowmaking became widespread, and resorts were able to ensure snow, even in drought years.
Old snowmaking technology was expensive, energy-intensive, and created boilerplate textured snow.
New, high-tech snowmaking systems are more efficient, increasing the rate of conversion from water to snow without requiring an increase in water, and can even operate at warmer temperatures than they used to. Some systems are now automated, activating snowmaking during favorable conditions.
These new systems not only create better-quality snow than they used to, but they also allow resorts to open earlier and close later, effectively extending the ski season, and saving the season during warmer years.
During the ‘non-winter’ of 2015-’16 in the East,
Loon Mountain reportedly received only 66 inches of snowfall, but after having invested $3 million to double their snowmaking capacity and upgrade efficiency by 75 percent, Loon credited the new snowmaking system for rescuing the season. And it isn’t just Loon that is putting money into these new technologies; resorts from the East to the West are innovating to give skiers reliable snow.
However, the industry still faces the challenges of a warming climate. A
study by the Climate Impact Lab in 2018 found that if the current warming trend continues, resorts should expect to lose a month of the ski season within the next two decades. This will likely prompt new innovations in snowmaking.
