Resorts weather the lack of storms

A pleasurable aside to any ski or snowboard trip is the view, and one of the best from Bear Mountain’s upper runs is that of the San Gorgonio Wilderness, and its namesake peak.

But as the season glides through its halfway point and into the busy Presidents Day weekend, there’s something glaringly wrong here: The wilderness and the mountain, Southern California’s tallest at 11,499 feet, are brown.

In the middle of winter!

Alas, the powerful storm that painted such a wintry landscape throughout the Sierra Nevada last weekend skipped the local ranges, as previous storms did, making the glistening slopes at Bear Mountain and Snow Summit seem even more like a mirage.

“They must have painted it on,” Miles Weida, a skier from San Diego, joked before carving turns down the glistening face of Geronimo, a black-diamond run at Bear Mountain.

That’s precisely what the staff at Bear Mountain and Snow Summit has done. Thanks to a prolonged January cold snap and a $6-million investment in new technology, the two adjacent resorts -- which are under similar ownership -- created their own winter.

Drawing water from Big Bear Lake, they have blown snow whenever possible and now have a base of two to four feet on 99% of their terrain, which means, essentially, that the only runs not available are among the trees.

“It’s definitely smooth riding, for the most part,” said Aaron Pond, 25, a snowboarder from Montana.

The cover is less extensive at Mountain High in Wrightwood, where the water supply is limited, and far less so at Snow Valley in Running Springs.

And because this had been shaping up as one of the driest seasons in recent history, “smooth” is not the proper adjective to describe the situation in most of California.

Before last weekend’s storm, by far the season’s largest and the first in more than six weeks, runs were becoming increasingly barren and business was down, on average, about 25%.

June Mountain in the Eastern Sierra closed for the season Jan. 28, after having been open for only three weeks.

Nearby Mammoth Mountain, which last season received a record 668 inches of snow, had only 78 inches and only two runs open at the top: Scotty’s and Cornice. Visitation was down 20% as a clientele hailing largely from Southern California was seemingly too preoccupied with golf to think about skiing or snowboarding.

“There’s still room to make up,” Mammoth spokeswoman Joani Lynch said.

Mammoth and Lake Tahoe-area resorts did get up to five feet during the storm and are now operating at or near 100%.

“It’s incredible how drastically the mountain has changed,” Rachael Woods, a spokeswoman for Alpine Meadows, wrote in an e-mail accompanied by a photo showing a skier knee-deep in powder amid snow-laden pine trees.

That’s the type of view required to recoup lost profits.

“All it takes is a couple good storms because, as they all know, there’s a tremendous amount of pent-up demand,” said Bob Roberts, executive director of California Ski Industry Assn.

Meanwhile, the storm watch continues for Southland resort operators, under another blue sky and during a heat wave that has as many people lying on beaches as riding the slopes.

Not that this is entirely bad.

“There are no lines whatsoever,” Michelle Chase, 23, a snowboarder from Beaumont, exclaimed from the base of Bear Mountain. “It’s been a really good day.”

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Riding high, for now: Despite concerns about global warming, the industry is faring well. Last season, 7.9 million skiers and snowboarders rode major California ski-area slopes.

That’s an increase of about 1 million over the previous decade. The snowboarding boom, better snowmaking technology and the construction of residential villages and time-share properties in resort communities are primary reasons.

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Making a difference: Snowboarders Shaun White and Gretchen Bleiler are among a growing number of featured personalities on the Virtual March to Stop Global Warming (stopglobalwarming.org). Skateboarder Tony Hawk and surfer Laird Hamilton are also on the list.

Bleiler, an Olympic silver medalist who recently switched to a hybrid vehicle, is the latest to have joined. Her statement:

“It’s important to me to have an environmentally clean lifestyle, not only because I’m a professional snowboarder and my livelihood depends so heavily on the environment, but also because I’m another person in the world whose decisions and actions affect our planet.

“Don’t think about reacting short-term to our global warming crisis; think about making lifestyle changes for the long-term that will be passed down from generation to generation. Even the smallest changes each of us make will have a huge impact to get our world back on track.”

pete.thomas@latimes.com