Silverton – Bob Dahlgren came “this close” to canceling his yearlong plan to ski Silverton Mountain this year.
“Last week, I was telling myself to cancel and just stay home and ski the deepest stuff we’ve had in a long, long time,” said the 33-year-old consultant from Seattle, where local ski areas that were shuttered last season for lack of snow are overwhelmingly buried under the fluff this year. “We heard about the sad snow conditions in southwest Colorado, and we have 7 feet back home. But it’s crazy how much snow there is here.”
Silverton Mountain has the deepest base in the state and is 95 percent of average. The mountain culls massive amounts of snow from northern storms – a 38-inch dump, for example, in late December that left nearby resorts with nary a flake. A small slot at the southern tip of the Uncompahgre Plateau has funneled snow from northern storms that typically ignore Colorado’s southernmost mountains. That slot, sitting directly above Silverton Mountain, has saved the reputation of the steep-and-deep area.
But Silverton is an anomaly in the Southwest, where Durango Mountain, Wolf Creek, Taos and Telluride are weathering one of their worst starts to a ski season in recent memory. In New Mexico, many resorts have yet to see any natural snowfall. Telluride ski area recently nixed plans to build its superpipe because it had used most of its allotted water supply to blow snow in the warm and dry early season.
The northern portion of the state, however, is trumpeting the best conditions on record. More than 20 feet of snow has pounded resorts in the central Rockies. The fluffy bounty has pushed the state’s skier visits to record levels, with 3.09 million ticket scans logged in the first three months of the season. Hidden behind those numbers – which put the state on track for the ever-elusive goal of 12 million skier visits – is a decline in visits to southern Colorado, an area where the number of visitors is significantly smaller than the megaresorts in Pitkin, Eagle and Summit counties.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service measures snowpack water content from 16 stations in southern Colorado and northern New Mexico. According to those stations, snowpack in the Rio Grande Basin as of Jan. 1 was 27 percent of normal and 31 percent of the measurement on Jan. 1 last year. The sprawling San Juan Basin is 42 percent of normal and 37 percent of the total measured Jan. 1, 2005, which was the start of what was heralded as a drought-busting year in the thirsty southwest.
Last year, Durango Mountain Resort was blanketed in 6 feet of snow the first 10 days of the year, thanks to the moisture-laden Pineapple Express storms that arrived from the southern hemisphere. This year, with most of the storms arriving from the north a la El Niño, the resort more closely resembles its former namesake, Purgatory. Less than three-quarters of the mountain is open.
“We are struggling a bit,” says Durango’s marketing director Matt Skinner, who chooses his words carefully when detailing what is unavoidably bad news. “It’s feast or famine.”
One bright side for southern Colorado resorts is they are much snowier than their colleagues in New Mexico and Arizona, where some resorts report nothing but a trace of natural snow since winter arrived.
That means sweltering skiers from the southwest are venturing north.
“This year we had to drive 10 hours just to find snow,” said Colin Herdt, a 26-year-old from Phoenix who spent 20 hours driving for three days of skiing at Wolf Creek, Colorado’s perennial leader for snowfall. “Usually Wolf Creek is the safest bet in the ski world.”
But not this year. Wolf Creek last week counted 103 inches of snowfall for the season, compared with nearly 270 inches at the same time last year. The perennial snow magnet has lost its pull this year.
But that isn’t necessarily translating into similar declines in business for the southern Colorado area. Many of the visitors to Wolf Creek and Durango Mountain Resort hail from snowless locales in Texas and Oklahoma. A lack of deep powder is often appealing for the flatland skiers.
“We had one of our busiest Decembers ever,” said Thaddeus Cano, manager of the Ski & Bow Rack gear shop in Pagosa Springs. “I mean, our snowfall was so horrible in November and December, but people were coming in and they were still loving it.”
Locals, however, are not as giddy.
Cano, an avid Wolf Creek skier, didn’t get on his home hill until into mid-January. He did, however, get a quick trip up to Monarch ski area, where he weathered some good-natured ribbing from locals.
“They kept telling us it was about time we had our share of no snow,” Cano said. “We always have powder, and I guess we deserve a rare off year.”
