Snow Fails to Give Ski Resorts Lift They Need

The Snow Valley Ski Resort had already called it quits on a nearly snowless winter when Pacific storms last week left behind a thick blanket of the white stuff and the best skiing of the season.

“It went from nothing to excellent,” said General Manager Benno J. Nager, who reopened the San Bernardino mountain resort this past weekend. However, attendance remained light, and Nager fears that the storms came too late to turn around a miserable winter that saw attendance fall by two-thirds from last year.

“It certainly will help improve our finances, but it won’t solve all our problems,” Nager said.

The winter of 1990-91 has proved a mean season for California ski resorts and related businesses. While snow-making equipment spared some resorts, the industry as a whole will see business decline by more than 50% from last year, according to official projections. Recent snowstorms arrived too late for many resorts, some of which never opened at all.

“There is no way we can go back to make up for the skiers that we lost in January and February,” said Bob Roberts, executive director of the California Ski Industry Assn., a trade group based in San Francisco. The state’s resorts will report only 2.5 million skier visits this winter, compared to about 6.5 million achieved in a normal season, such as winter of 1988-89, Roberts said.

The storms left nearly eight feet of snow on the ground at Mt. Shasta Ski Park, but the resort will probably remain closed, marketing manager Tim Larive said. The remaining season would not be long enough to recoup the estimated $60,000 the resort would have to pay for liability insurance, he said.

“We figured it couldn’t get any worse than last year, and lo and behold it did,” Larive said.

While the smaller resorts without snow-making equipment have fared the worst, the thin snow pack--which was less than 20% of normal in many spots during mid-February--has also crippled some of the state’s major resorts.

At Mammoth Mountain Ski Area in the Sierra Nevada, attendance had been down by two-thirds from normal levels, with only 120 of the resort’s 3,500 acres of ski areas open. Mammoth had cut its permanent work force nearly in half and reduced lift ticket prices by $10 to boost sagging attendance.

By Monday, however, the storms had dumped up to six feet of snow at the resort and more was expected. However, the severe weather had restricted operations at Mammoth, supervisor Scot Corn said.

“It’s snowing really hard and it’s extremely windy--they had only two lifts open today,” Corn said. “But conditions will be extremely good when this clears up.”

In ski communities, the ripple effects have already been widely felt at condominium rental businesses, restaurants, hotels and retail shops.

At Alpine Outfitters ski shop in Redding, about 50 miles south of Mt. Shasta, proprietor Ben Mattox said sales plummeted 80% in January from last year’s level and employment is down to six from as many as 30 full- and part-time workers in normal years. Nearby Mt. Lassen, which normally has quite good skiing, was not able to open for the first time in 51 years, he said.

“We’re just not able to pay our bills,” said Mattox, whose shop is open only in the winter months. In the northern Tahoe area, 505 claims for unemployment were filed in January, up from 240 in the same month last year, said Kay Williams, director of the Tahoe North Visitors and Convention Bureau. For the first half of February, 246 were filed, compared to 96 in that period in 1990. On Monday, a strong winter storm triggered an avalanche in the northern Tahoe area, and snow was expected to fall as low as 5,500 feet by nightfall.

The season would have been even more disastrous if not for snow-making equipment that has kept many resorts up and running. In Northern California, the four areas that have snow-making equipment are actually showing some gains, whereas some of those without the expensive machines did not bother to open for the season.

“Our business is up . . . with skier counts ahead 7% for the year to date,” said Tim Newhart, marketing manager for Heavenly Ski Resort near South Lake Tahoe.

Thanks to $14 million in snow-making equipment installed over the past five years, Heavenly had been operating 18 of its 24 lifts. It has also been able to maintain its full staffing level of 1,200, although some employees are working far fewer hours than usual, Newhart said.

Even resorts with snow-making equipment have run into trouble. Snow Valley Ski Resort began cutting back on snow making in late December after its water supply began to run dry. It plans to use treated waste water next year, said general manager Nager.

While machine-made snow has kept many slopes open, ski resort operators could not do anything about the warm and dry weather that made it difficult to put Californians into a skiing mood for much of the season. The recent storms might help do just that.

“You need rain in the cities at this time of the year or skiers lose interest no matter what you have on the ground,” said Dick Kun, president of Snow Summit Ski Resort Corp., which had kept its Big Bear-area resort opened with snow-making equipment.