Warm temperatures in Oregon affect ski resorts

Above-normal temperatures have caused a slow start to the ski season in the Pacific Northwest. Many ski resorts at lower elevations in Oregon still haven’t opened, and resorts at higher elevations are starting the season with lower snowfall totals.

Greg Pack is the president and general manager of Mt. Hood Meadows. Andrew Gast is the general manager of Mt. Ashland Ski Area and Lauren Burke is the director of marketing and communications for Mt. Bachelor. They join us with details.

This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. We turn now to a pretty dismal start to the ski season in the Northwest. It’s a one-two punch of ongoing climate change in combination with the natural cycle of a warmer El Niño year. Many of Oregon’s smaller or lower elevation resorts still have not opened. The webcam at the base of Skibowl and Government Camp, for example, shows a grassy slope right now. Some of the larger ones have opened, but with lower snowpack and with limited trail options. We’re going to hear from a few different resorts right now, starting with Mt. Bachelor in Central Oregon. Lauren Burke is the director of marketing and communications there and she joins us now. Welcome to the show.

Lauren Burke: Thank you for having me.

Miller: Thanks for joining us. What is Mt. Bachelor like today?

Burke: You know, the good news is, looking out of my office here at our West Village Base area, which is just over 6,000 feet, about 6,300 feet, snow is coming down. It’s been coming down since early this morning and it looks very, very wintry out here. The trees are covered, happy skiers and riders. So that is great to see right now.

Miller: What goes to your mind as both a skier and as somebody who works for a snow dependent industry, when you see snow falling from the sky?

Burke: It is pure excitement. We work in such an interesting industry that is dependent on mother nature and on snowfall. And I’ve worked in this industry for a long time and some years you see slow, slow starts and some years it comes out with a bang. But the second you start to see flakes flying out there is when everyone’s excitement level just goes through the roof, like you said, from a skier’s perspective and from a business perspective.

Miller: OK. So at this moment, some flakes are falling, which is good. But it doesn’t seem like we’re looking at the possibility of a major dump of snow today or in the next coming days. I mean, what does the short-term forecast look like?

Burke: Yeah, looking at the forecast this morning, it looks better than we’ve seen, honestly, all season. It looks like we’re gonna get a couple inches here and there throughout the week, more snow over the weekend, potentially six to 10 inches on Saturday. And then it looks like even more snow next week. So these are colder storms than we’ve seen earlier in the season, which is great news. That means snow, not rain. I just actually talked to a couple of people on my team who just came back to the office. They said the skiing is really good out there.

Miller: How many lifts are open? What percentage of your lifts and what percentage of your trails are actually accessible right now?

Burke: So we have nine out of our 12 lifts open. We probably have about half of our trails open on the mountain right now. We’ve been telling our skiers and riders to stick to groomed runs. Like we all know, it has been a slow start. Our snowpack is below average from where we typically are this time of year. So the skiing, on the groomed runs, is great. And then hopefully, if we can get a couple feet of snow here in the next 7 to ten days, then we can start to explore a little bit more off-piste terrain.

Miller: So as of this morning, I saw something like 25 inches of base depth. How does that compare to where you normally are at the end of December, or beginning of January?

Burke: Yeah. It’s much lower than we typically see this time of year. It is probably one of our lower snowpacks we’ve seen in our history at this time of year. We have been able to really maintain the snowpack that we have, which is just a testament to our team and the work that they’ve been doing out there. Because we’ve seen years where our base depth has been a little higher, but the conditions haven’t been as good as they have been this year. So it’s been a bit of a balancing act, making sure that we’re putting out the best possible product we can, given the conditions.

Miller: Well, how do you do that because at the very beginning you said, what makes so much sense, that you’re so dependent on Mother Nature. It’s worth saying again, Mother Nature, highly impacted by humans burning fossil fuels for 100-plus years now. But how do you actually maintain the snowpack, maintenance-wise? What do you have to do?

Burke: So it really is a 24-hour operation here. The second the lift stops spinning at 4:00 p.m. every day, our outside operations crew, our grooming crew, is out there. They are grooming out the snow which helps it stay intact. They’re moving to areas of the mountain that need it, whether that’s maintaining our base area by pushing snow to where skiers load the lift, patching wherever is needed and then making snow whenever conditions allow. So using our snow making system, making snow, moving that snow to where we need it, grooming that snow out. It really is an intricate operation for sure.

Miller: Let’s turn to questions about revenue. Is it fair to say that you’ve already lost some revenue from people who chose not to buy day passes over the Christmas break because they just didn’t think it was worth it?

Burke: Yeah, like we always say, more snow always equals a higher demand. It’s just the nature of the business here. The more snow you get, the more skiers come out. And while it was a much slower start to the season than we like to see, we saw some really promising things over the holidays. We had strong lift ticket sales, we had strong use of some of our other ticket products, like our four day pass that we have. And we’re confident that with snowfall, we’ll be able to make some of that back up from the slow start. Mount Bachelor has a really long season. We’re open through the end of May. We have one of the best spring skiing destinations anywhere in the country. So with more snow in 2024, we’re hopeful that we’re gonna make some ground up.

Miller: Does a season like this put even more focus on diversifying the way a mountain-based business makes money? I guess I’m thinking about things like even more mountain biking or just ways to make money off-season to offset potential losses going forward.

Burke: Yeah, for sure. I mean, you see it across resorts right now. There’s a lot more than just skiing and riding that’s offered. There’re events. We have a huge event calendar. We do two large music festivals up here. We have Mt. Bachelor beer tastings on the mountain. We do events with our partners like Burton and Mammut. We, in the summer, have rafting, we have mountain biking. It’s always something that we’re looking at. How do we get people up here to enjoy the snow? Maybe it’s skiing and riding, maybe it’s playing in the snow. We know that people are looking for a little bit more these days and it’s always front of mind for us.

Miller: Lauren Burke. Thanks very much.

Burke: Thank you.

Miller: We head to Mount Ashland in Southern Oregon now, which still has not opened for the season. Andrew Gast is the general manager of Mt. Ashland ski area. Welcome to Think Out Loud.

Andrew Gast: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Miller: On your website, it says there is no snow on the summit, no snow mid-mountain and only seven inches at the base. What does the mountain look like right now?

Gast: You know, it actually looks a lot better than it did a few days ago. We’ve got snow covering almost all the ground. We just haven’t checked the mid-mount or the summit stakes yet. But it looks like about five to six inches. Pretty good coverage right now.

Miller: Five to six inches. I mean, that’s sort of what you’d hope for, for a storm in the middle of the season, just to add a little bit of fluff to the top. I mean, it’s obviously not enough yet to ski on. What is the hope right now? What’s the best case scenario for when you could open at least part of the resort?

Gast: Right now, the best case scenario would be for us to have a partial opening this weekend. Our crews are able to get out there this morning actually and start pushing some snow around. So we are building up some ramps and trying to build up our beginners area for that possibility.

Miller: And is it the case where you’re sort of harvesting some snow from, say, parking lots or upper parts of the mountain that you can’t open yet, so you might as well just take some snow from there? I mean, how do you build up the ramps even?

Gast: That’s exactly what we’re doing. So, we just have a front end loader out there and our groomers and we’re harvesting and farming snow from the parking lots and other areas where we don’t need it. And we’ll just keep doing that as much as we can until we run out of snow.

Miller: When does Mt. Ashland ski area normally open for the season?

Gast: Yeah, that’s an interesting question. About 30% of the time, it’s sometime in January. We always get ready so that we can open by Thanksgiving if we have the weather for it. Our target date is always the second Saturday in December. But you know, we’re a mountain without snow making. So we’re completely at the whim of Mother Nature.

Miller: Is snow making a possibility? Is it an option at Mt. Ashland?

Gast: It’s not for us. We’re perched on the top of the highest peak in the Siskiyou Range and in the Ashland watershed. Our mountain is limited to just 5,000 gallons of water per day for the whole operation. And that’s not nearly enough for a snow making system.

Miller: How much water would resorts that really rely on artificial snow making use?

Gast: A single snow making gun uses about 100 gallons of water every minute. So our entire water rights would be only enough for one gun for 50 minutes.

Miller: And that’s nowhere close to what I’ve seen on some individual trails. I don’t know, 20 or 30 guns.

Gast: Exactly. Yeah. In order to have a decent system, you need to have a reservoir that’s several million gallons.

Miller: And that water is not available to you. And artificial snow or manmade snow is then not available.

Gast: Correct. Yeah, we barely have enough water rights just to wash dishes and flush toilets.

Miller: What has the delayed start meant for seasonal employees, people who don’t work year round but are hired for ski school or to work as dishwashers or all the things that are required when people are actually skiing?

Gast: It has a huge impact on them. We hired them all in November. We had an orientation on November 16th and they haven’t been to work since then, except for a few departments that may have done training. But all of those folks are on hold right now and they’re probably looking for other employment.

Miller: Meaning that when you’re finally able to open, ideally soon - although that’s, as you said, the best case scenario - it’s not clear that all the people that you’ve tried to on-board [will] still be available?

Gast: Yeah, that’s always the challenge in these late opening years, that the folks that we brought on, they have to make a living and so a lot of them won’t be able to work when we’re ready to open.

Miller: Those are people whose employment was always going to be contingent on opening. But what about full time staff if you’re not bringing in money right now?

Gast: The current situation has impacted all of our employees except salaried and we only have four salaried staff. So all of our team, even those year round folks, have had their hours reduced, in some cases, up to 80%. And then looking in the next couple of weeks, if we’re not able to open, we’ll have to make some additional changes.

Miller: “Additional changes” sounds like a kind way to say layoffs potentially.

Gast: Yeah, it would be furloughs or layoffs.

Miller: What about season passes that people have already bought? Where do those customers… I mean, what happens to them?

Gast: So the season pass product is a non-refundable product. And so when people buy it, they’re getting a pretty huge discount on what the window price would be. But we really target, trying to look if we can offer at least 50% of what our operating schedule was. So, for us, that means trying to get open by February the 8th. We don’t even hit halfway to our season until that. So, you know, even though we’ve lost the Christmas break, we still have about four months of operations ahead of us.

Miller: Last year was a great year for skiers in the Northwest, great year for snowpack, beautiful spring and it’s a good reminder that it’d be a mistake to read too much into any one season or one month. But the long-term projections for the Northwest are really clear: more rain in the winters and less snow. I’m wondering how much you see this season, not just as a really serious near term challenge, but as a taste of what’s to come?

Gast: Yeah, we have about 45 years of good solid daily snowfall information. What we’re seeing is a couple things. One is that the winters are becoming more unpredictable and less constant. And we’re seeing later winters, we’re seeing a more excessive snowfall, more scant snowfall. And the really interesting thing is when you look at the past 45 years, the past 10 years have been really, really solid for us in December. But you go back 25 or 30 years and December is not reliable at all. So that’s an interesting thing. But overall what we’re seeing is just less reliability on winter in general.

Miller: Andrew Gast, thanks very much and I’m hoping for snow for you.

Gast: Thank you. I appreciate that.

Miller: Andrew Gast is the general manager of the Mt. Ashland Ski Area.

We end our tour of Northwest ski resorts on Mt. Hood. Greg Pack is the president and general manager of Mt. Hood Meadows, which also runs Cooper Spur just on the eastern side of Mt. Hood. Welcome to Think Out Loud.

Greg Pack: Thanks for having me.

Miller: Earlier this morning it was raining in Portland. It’s in the mid-40s right now. That can be a recipe for snow on Mt. Hood. What are you seeing?

Pack: Well, that really blessed us. We actually started seeing snow early this morning and reported about one inch of new snow on our morning report and it continues to snow throughout the day. So we’re excited that the temperatures finally dropped to be able to change that moisture into snow for us.

Miller: Gosh, I bet. I mean, I hear one-inch of new snow. It’s better than zero inches, but it’s not a lot.

Pack: You got it there. We need everything we can get right now. We’re looking forward to what’s in the forecast for this weekend. It looks like we’ll get a few inches every night. And then starting Friday and Saturday, we could see some big snowfall amounts, allowing us to open up more terrain.

Miller: How much is open right now percentage-wise?

Pack: Well, we have about seven out of our 12 lifts open. But a few of those lifts are volume lifts. On busy days they’d be open. We’re just not using them right now. But we do have our Hood River Meadows base area closed because it’s at a lower elevation and we can’t get snow down there. But we have Cascade open, which is our highest lift. On Star, we put in a brand new six seat chair lift this year, a $12 million project for us, that we opened up last Friday. So our team has done an incredible job of harvesting snow. We have Snowcat dump trucks. We’re finding it from every edge of the mountain and trying to put in the right places to open up additional terrain and connect some trails.

Miller: So some of the themes that we heard on Mt. Bachelor and Mt. Ashland, where right now part of the name of the game is literally trucking snow around or doing it with wheelbarrows or Snowcats?

Pack: Yeah. There are times when skiers will take shovels out there and big sheets of plastic and shovel from the trees onto that plastic to allow it to slide down a chute to put it in the right spot. We’re not quite there yet but I met with our ‘cat drivers last night before they went out. And they’re just getting super creative on where they’re finding snow and they’re finding little pockets that they can pick up and they’re hauling it over long distances. But getting it in some of those crucial areas for us.

Miller: Last year was a great winter, as we were talking earlier, snow-wise up and down the Pacific Northwest. Did that lead to an increase in advanced sales of season passes for this season? I mean, in other words, does a good year the previous year mean more people are going to get excited about skiing at the end of the season or in the fall?

Pack: Typically it does. We do a spring season pass campaign, but we don’t have deadlines per se like we used to in the past. What we do is demand pricing. So if we hit a certain level, actually, the prices go up. In the last few years, we did sell out of season passes. But Oregon, Pacific Northwest skiers and riders are really savvy. They look at the forecast. I think people are holding back. We’re still selling a fair amount of season passes every day but not as much as we did last year. This is still our second best year on record for pass sales. We’re doing well, but last year was definitely an anomaly with the amount of snow we had.

Miller: What about ski school sign ups? Are those down?

Pack: Well, not in our beginner progression. This is great beginner terrain for everybody. You know, the beginners aren’t looking for those steep double black diamond open bowl trails to be able to hit. They just want a skiing and riding surface. So we’ve had some great learn-to-ski programs that we’ve gotten people into and that business is actually doing fairly well for us right now.

Miller: I mentioned Cooper Spur, which is a much smaller sort of side resort on the east side of the mountain. It’s not open yet, I assume, because of altitude. So what’s the thinking there of when it might open?

Pack: Well, we need about another foot and a half or two feet of snow there. There’s not much on the ground. Our mountain manager there is in contact with his team every few days, letting them know what’s going on. We’re hopeful that this weekend could provide enough for us to be able to get out on that snow and start packing it down and get some things in place.

However, we have a lodge down there as well, a hotel and cabins. And it was actually a record December for us. A lot of people want to come up, stay in the woods and hang out. They had to come up to Mt. Hood Meadows to be able to ski. You know, we’re all part of the same company but we’re hopeful we can get that open here in a bit. But that’s fairly normal for Cooper Spur being at that low elevation. There are some years that it takes a while to get the skiing and riding going.

Miller: I’m intrigued by the idea that you had a really good year, really good month in December for the sort of the resort side of that. I guess I would have assumed that there was a really clear connection between the ability to ski and people wanting to go up to a Mt. Hood resort of any kind. Are they somewhat divorced?

Pack: Well, no. The resort, the lodging side of that did well. And that’s what I was saying. People just love being in the mountains, just trying to get out, being in the trees. It’s very spiritual just to be able to get out and do some hiking, wandering around in the woods. [It’s] great family time. That’s where we saw one of our best years at the lodging there. The resort side for skiing was definitely down due to visitation. Again, people are pretty savvy. We are seeing probably half the visitation we’d normally see in December. But that’s reflective of the snowfall that we saw as well.

Miller: What do you think that means for all the associated businesses in the area? I’m thinking in particular about all the businesses - restaurants and bars and shops and lodging all the way up the west side of 26, in Zigzag and Rhododendron, Sandy, Welches. What have you heard?

Pack: They’re experiencing some of the same things. Numbers are obviously down. When you’re down a few thousand visits every day during your busier times when you’d like to see those people. And it’s happening with Ski Bowl and Timberline. That traffic dictates that business in those restaurants. So I’m sure they’re down. I haven’t spoken to any of them individually and I can only speak to how we’re doing. But, yeah, that volume definitely hurts you. You have to be in a really healthy position as a company to be able to weather these storms. And fortunately, we are. We actually reinvest all of the money we make back into the resort on capital projects. So we don’t rely on that. We’re in a good position right now and we can weather this kind of shortage of snowfall.

Miller: Greg Pack, thanks very much. Best of luck to you and best of snow.

Pack: Thank you.

Miller: Greg Pack is president and general manager of Mt. Hood Meadows.

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