Business was looking frighteningly bad to Hermon Mountain Ski Area owner Bill Whitcomb about a week ago.
Skiing in Maine, he said, usually begins in mid-December, with a good season starting on Dec. 1, offering plenty of time to groom trails for this week’s Christmas school vacation. Only this year, two things were missing — snow and, especially, cold weather.
“We had a trail half-done on Nov. 29. We started early thinking this was going to be a good year,” Whitcomb said Tuesday, “but it just warmed up.”
The unseasonably mild temperatures and lack of snowfall delayed the opening of Hermon Mountain until Dec. 26, its latest start in 30 years. Most of the 18 Alpine ski areas that are members of the Ski Maine Association reported similar delays.
Tuesday’s snowstorm, which dumped six to 10 inches of the white stuff between Lewiston and the Canadian border, will help save Christmas vacation, one of the industry’s busiest times, Whitcomb and other ski area owners said.
Still, most of them have only part of their trail systems online so far.
“Everybody, even the big places like Sugarloaf and Sunday River, is struggling this year,” said Landon Fake, general manager of the municipally-owned Camden Snow Bowl.
“Last week we needed to make snow for Christmas week, and we couldn’t,” said Scott Shanaman, owner of Lost Valley ski area in Auburn, which opened Wednesday. “Missing half of Christmas week is not the start we wanted.”
Being a week in which schools are closed, the time between Christmas and New Year’s Day is important to the state’s ski areas. Only the mid-February winter vacation for schools draws more skiers, owners said.
Tuesday’s snowfall was important in a subtle way, said Bill Getman, general manager of Bigrock Mountain ski area of Mars Hill, which opened on Monday. It reminded people that ski season has arrived, he said.
“When people don’t see snow in their yards, a lot of them don’t think about winter sports at all. Snow piques their interests to go see what’s out there,” Whitcomb said.
Last year was similarly balmy in December through Christmas 2014, when it was 55 degrees and raining in much of Maine, Whitcomb said. This year, ski area owners hope for heavy snowfall right into March to make up for lost time.
“If we hadn’t been through the same thing last year, we would have been panicking. Last year we were,” Whitcomb admitted. “It turned out to be a good season because while it started late, people skied late, so we know it can turn out well.”
Although a big blanket of snow, like what Tuesday’s storm provided, is certainly welcomed by the state’s smaller ski areas, the snow that really counts is the stuff they make themselves. There typically isn’t enough natural snow to make good skiing trails, so manufacturing it allows mountains to create better trails and pack them down. Of the 18 Ski Maine Association members, only three — Baker Mountain in Moscow, Mount Jefferson in Lee and Quoggy Jo in Presque Isle — rely entirely on natural snow.
Manufactured snow allowed Sugarloaf, the state’s largest ski area with 146 trails, to have 20 trails open on Wednesday, up from 11 the week before, workers there said. The state’s second-largest, Sunday River, had 34 of its 129 trails open on Wednesday, with expectations to open 11 more by the weekend.
The need to make snow this year has been costly to Whitcomb, who estimated that he spent $15,000 making snow through Dec. 26 — to little effect, given the warm temperatures.
“We are all struggling to make snow, we just don’t have that many opportunities,” said Fake, whose coastal location and weather allowed him to open last year on Jan. 1.
“If we are lucky, we will do half a week of business this week,” Getman said.
Fake expects to have four trails open when his season starts on Friday. As of Wednesday, Fake’s crews had been in snow production for 36 hours and were beginning to distribute it.
Manmade or natural, the lack of snow hurts the economies of the communities around ski areas, which are large part-time employers in wintertime. Most employ 60 to 70 ski instructors, snowmakers, mechanics, concessionaires, ski patrollers, medics, clerks and ticket takers — once the mountain is open.
Good weather, or the lack of it, is something ski area workers learn to live with. Shanaman busied himself for most of the month repairing terrain and buildings at his ski area. Whitcomb endures the warm spells philosophically.
“I can’t control the weather. I just have to worry about the things I can control,” Whitcomb said. “I just tighten up the purse strings and I ride it out.”
“If you get upset about the weather in this business,” Shanaman said, “you can’t be in this business.”