Despite California drought fears, resorts aren’t too worried about the ski season

Mary Jo Gorton readied her snowboard gear Tuesday in the Sugar Bowl parking lot surrounded by more white snow than brown dirt.

But for the Mill Valley snowboarder, there was still too much bare hillside showing on a warm, sunny afternoon in the middle of February than she would prefer.

“Reminds me of the drought,” Gorton said.

After a strong start to the winter, a dry January and February have reduced the Sierra snowpack to 53 percent of normal for this time of year, a marked difference from last winter’s record-breaking snowfall that kept some Sierra ski resorts open into midsummer.

A persistent high-pressure ridge is parked over California, and no major snow is in the forecast.

The snowpack is dramatically different from last season when massive amounts of snow fell in the Sierra. By March last year, more than 50 feet of snow had fallen at the highest mountain elevations.

Now, barring an unusually snowy March, the Sierra ski resorts are facing the remainder of a season that’s likely to look a lot more like the winters during California’s five-year drought, which ended officially three years ago.

During the drought, the lack of snow had ski resorts closing early, and hotel owners and others dependent on a snowy winter were scrambling to find new ways to get tourists to the region. Some built zip lines, mountain bike trails and even wedding venues, all in hopes of broadening their customer base.

But the resorts say this year, they’re not close to panicking, and there’s still enough snow to keep skiers happy, though it’s in the form of machine-groomed runs instead of the powder they’d prefer. The dreaded “drought” word isn’t yet being tossed around. Michael Reitzell, president of Ski California, said resorts’ managers know all too well what to expect of California’s boom and bust winters, so they’re not worried about a single dry season.

“For the snowpack to vary from normal is normal,” Reitzell said.

He said the 32 California parks and resort owners in his association haven’t released their ticket sale figures yet, but, anecdotally, the resorts were busy during the three-day Presidents Day holiday after a downturn after the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday.

Most of them have almost all of their runs open.

Signs of climate change?

Nonetheless, in the Sierra, conditions are starting to feel more like spring, when nighttime temperatures regularly dip below freezing, but you can ski during the day in a T-shirt. Such unseasonably warm weather may be a sign of things to come as California’s climate changes.

A state-produced climate change assessment predicts that by the end of this century, temperatures in the Sierra could raise by an average of nine degrees, meaning more rain falls instead of snow. That could eliminate the snowpack entirely below 6,000 feet and reduce snowfall totals by 60 percent across nearly the entire Sierra Nevada range, the report’s authors said.

Another study published in 2018 by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that the water content in the Sierra snow could see a drop by as much as a 79 percent by 2100.

So far this season, though, the Sierra resorts say season cool nighttime temperatures have prevented too much of the snow that fell earlier in the season from melting off.

That means resorts like Sugar Bowl have around three feet of compressed hard-packed snow at their lower elevation bases, more than enough to give skiers and snowboarders their money’s worth for the foreseeable future. For now, most resorts still have close to 100 percent of their runs open, Reitzell said.

Liesl Hepburn, the public relations director for Squaw Valley and Alpine Meadows, said the top elevations at Squaw still have around 7 1/2 feet of snow. The good news about the lack of snow is it’s kept the roads clear, so customers haven’t had to deal with tire-chain controls and road closures from vehicle spinouts, she said.

“It’s in many ways a blessing to have dry roads and easy, safe access for our holiday visitors,” Hepburn said.

Gorton, the Mill Valley snowboarder at Sugar Bowl, said she was disappointed with the lack of snow she saw on the drive to the mountains from the Bay Area.

While she would have preferred fresh powder, the kids are out of school and a vacation-rental house was booked long ago, so they’re going to make do with the machine-groomed hardpack.

“We’re going to make the best of it,” Gorton said.