Lack of Snow Worsens Problems for Colorado Ski Resorts

Arriving late and bringing bitter cold, winter rolled into Colorado over the weekend. By Monday, five inches of snow had fallen at the state’s beleaguered Front Range ski areas, but scarcely enough to dust the alarmingly brown Rocky Mountains.

The weekend snow--any snow--was heartening to the skittish ski industry. At the same time, it did little to alleviate a serious water shortage that may yet disturb the young ski season. Lessened flow in Colorado’s rivers and streams poses a threat to the greater ecosystem, and the dearth of moisture could force officials to restrict snow-making activities at some major ski resorts.

While some Colorado resorts have enjoyed plentiful snowfall--Purgatory, Telluride and Wolf Creek in the south and west, for example--northern and central ski areas such as Vail, Aspen and Beaver Creek had, until the weekend, gone without and had relied upon artificial snow-making to allow their runs to open.

Avid skiers pay attention to such matters, and, according to travel agents, have been staying away from the state’s slopes.

“We’ve had zero bookings to Colorado for the first time ever,” said Irene Ross, owner of Ross Travel Consultants in Boston. “It’s not good. I feel bad for the Coloradans. We’re not happy campers about this, either.”

With snowfall at only 60% of the average, snow-making machines have been working whenever conditions have allowed. Colorado’s unusually dry fall and above-normal temperatures have combined to melt what little snow has settled on the Rocky Mountains. The forecast is for continued bitter cold (down to minus 25 degrees in the mountains Monday night) but little snow.

Of all the Front Range resorts struggling to cope with snowless conditions, Keystone has battled most fiercely, relying almost entirely on artificial snow-making. The water levels in the Snake River--Keystone’s water source for its vast snow-making activities--reached such a low point last week that state officials warned that snow-making might be restricted.

“We have never been in a situation like this in the history of snow-making at Keystone,” Cara Herron, a spokeswoman for the resort, one of four Colorado ski areas owned by Vail Associates, said before the latest snow.

Keystone, 75 miles west of Denver, has the largest automated snow-making system in North America. The resort is frequently the first ski area in the country to open. When it opened this year on Oct. 25, Keystone needed to make up for lost time and missing snow. Few could have envisioned the circumstances that occurred last week, when the Snake River dipped below a low-flow threshold of six cubic feet per second, the lowest in the history of the resort’s contract with the state Water Conservation Board.

Many entities use the water in the Snake and other rivers and streams that serve as snow-making sources for Colorado’s ski resorts. But only a few of those users--the fish and wildlife that live in and utilize the waterways--have their water interests protected by state and federal officials.

The minimum flow levels are established so that fish can live and spawn safely. Low water levels expose the eggs laid by fall-spawning fish or allow them to freeze.

Jay Skinner, the in-stream flow program coordinator for the Colorado Division of Wildlife, is responsible for monitoring the water levels in the state’s streams and rivers.

“What we’ve learned over the last few days is that there are a number of streams statewide that are approaching minimal levels for stream flow,” he said last week.

Lack of snow combined with freezing temperatures makes matters worse, Skinner said, because without an insulating blanket of snow the streams freeze, further lowering water flow.

Skinner said last week that the ski resorts, Keystone in particular, were near the point where their water use will be cut off. “They are at the threshold,” he said. “They are right there. They know we are watching them.”

Under the looming peaks of the Continental Divide, Boyd Mitchell, Keystone’s director of ski area planning and development, spoke with great affection about his computerized snow-making system. Mitchell said his machinery has the capacity to gulp 3,000 gallons of water a minute for snow-making across 859 acres of the resort.

Water is diverted to a pump house hard by the Snake River, and six pumps send it 1,400 feet up the mountain, where a vast system of pipes distributes the water to the resort’s snow-making machines.

Mitchell’s optimism suppressed any fears of a shutdown. “Without capacity to make snow,” he said of the dry weather, “we don’t sweat this stuff.”

* THE BIG CHILL: A cold spell grips the Southland on the first day of winter. B1