Loveland Ski Area this summer started a countdown on its website to the second on Sept. 21 when snow making would start.
When the clock hit zero Tuesday, temperatures on the Front Range hovered around 90 degrees. Even up on the Continental Divide, the thermometer hit 64.
“There is no way we could make snow, so we stopped the countdown,” Loveland spokesman John Sellers said.
Snowmaking season in Colorado often comes shockingly early, when most people are not ready to think of winter. But this year a sweltering September has broken heat records, turning resorts’ arsenals of snow guns into little more than over-powered sprinklers.
“We usually start making snow in the third week of September,” said Leigh Hierholzer, marketing director for Arapahoe Basin, which vies with neighboring Loveland each year to be the first ski slope in North America to open.
The forecast is not promising. The National Weather Service is calling this week for ski country highs in the 60s and lows in the mid-30s.
Read the rest of this report at the Gazette’s Outdoors blog, .
