Snow Machines Again Take Up Slack on Slopes

The mischievous weather phenomenon known as La Nina is expected to be back to her old tricks this winter, depriving local ski resorts of their normal precipitation and making them more dependent on costly machine-made snow.

While this year’s percentage of rain and snowfall is impossible to predict, meteorologists warn that an already parched Southern California and its mountain resorts are in for another dry winter. Last year, La Nina gave Southern California just 61% of its normal rain and snowfall, making it drier than most years when La Nina is in play.

Drier winters hurt the bottom line for local resorts, as higher snow-making overhead eats away at revenues. Southern California’s ski and snowboard resorts generate a combined annual revenue of about $88 million and account for one-fifth of all lift tickets sold in the state, according to the California Ski Industry Assn.

But operators of local ski areas say they are ready for whatever La Nina sends their way.

“If we get something like last year, it’s OK because we could still open,” said Samantha Teofilo, promotions manager for Big Bear Mountain, which opened Nov. 24 with a machine-made snow base of at least 18 inches. “We made snow like crazy last year. We’ll just make it again.”

Thanks to their own tinkering with nature, the region’s other major ski resorts--Snow Summit, Mountain High and Snow Valley--also are open for business, despite the fact that hardly a flake of actual snow has fallen. Mountain High, for example, recently whipped up an 80-hour blizzard with its battery of 500 snow guns. Last season, the resort used its snow-making equipment to salvage much of its business, selling just 55,000 fewer lift tickets than the record 425,000 set the year prior during the snowy El Nino winter.

The region’s busiest resort, Snow Summit, also lost business last year, with 100,000 fewer visits, but still managed to attract 458,000 winter sport enthusiasts.

Though the forecast for Southern California is a drier winter, La Nina is expected to leave the overall temperature alone, much as it did last year. Despite warmer-than-normal temperatures in December and January, a chilly February and March pushed average winter temperatures slightly below the region’s normal 60-degree benchmark, according to Weather Data Inc. in Wichita, Kan.

Machine-made snow, which can be produced even above the freezing point, can last in temperatures as high as 50 degrees given the so-called “refrigeration effect” in which snow, real or manufactured, keeps air temperatures above it considerably colder.

Manufacturing snow, however, isn’t cheap.

Snow Valley spent about $400,000 last year turning 75 million gallons of water into 460 acre-feet of snow.

But real snow can sometimes be as expensive as no snow, according to Bob Roberts, executive director of the California Ski Industry Assn.

Last year, he said, La Nina dumped considerable precipitation in Northern California and the Eastern Sierra, and ski resorts there spent as much as $500,000 digging out from deep drifts and defusing potential avalanches. Heavy snowfall, Roberts said, can also hamper lift-ticket sales if skiers and snow boarders are unable to reach the resort.

“It’s worse to have too much snow than too little,” Roberts said.

And at local resorts such as Mountain High, no snow is apparently no problem. “Snow-wise, we’re getting off to a slow start, but business-wise, we’re way up,” said resort spokesman John McColly, who said attendance at the facility has been brisk since it opened Nov. 23.

Such enthusiasm, however, has not translated into sales at the Sport Chalet in La Canada Flintridge, one of the area’s largest ski equipment retailers.

John Canby, who works the sales floor in the ski department, said the weeks between Thanksgiving and Presidents Day are typically Sport Chalet’s busiest for ski equipment, but that so far this year sales have been slow. Canby blamed the sluggish pace on the weather.

“It’s been warm and dry out there, and skiing hasn’t been on a lot of people’s minds,” he said.