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Winter business outlook: ‘A year of survival’

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No-snow volleyball

In the Winterfest volleyball tournament — played on grass this year — Adam Lamson of the Waterbury Fire Department goes high for a spike. 

Vermont’s snow sports industries are having an epic winter — but not in a good way.

After last year’s prodigious snows and long winter sports season, which ran up a record number of 4.7 million alpine skier and rider visits and boosted sales of snowmobiles and other gear, this winter is proving memorable in a different way.

“This is a year of survival,” said Mike Miller, who has been at the helm of Mountain Meadows ski touring center in Killington for 28 years and has had virtually no trails open this winter.

He is not alone. Many Nordic centers, especially in central and southern Vermont, can count in single digits the days they’ve had skiing.

Can he remember a worse year? “Never,” Miller said. “It’s the worst.”

Tim Mills of Bethel heads the statewide nonprofit snowmobile association, the Vermont Association of Snow Travelers, which has 128 member clubs. Mills’ local club, the White River Valley Ramblers, has not rambled once this year on its trails.

“We’ve never officially groomed or opened,” said Mills, who became president of VAST last year. Aside from some brief snowmobiling in the state’s two strongholds, in the high elevations of Woodford down south and the Northeast Kingdom, the entire 5,000-mile system has been closed all winter.

“It’s very discouraging, but even more so knowing that people who want to can’t ride,” he said.

From Vermont’s downhill ski resorts to its Nordic centers and snowmobiling industry, words like “challenging” and “difficult” and “horrible” crop up in interviews and hint at the common thread of concerns about this nearly snowless and unusually warm winter.

For a nonverbal indicator of how different and discouraging this year is, look no further than the top of Mount Mansfield to the snow depth gauge on the state’s highest mountain.

The snow depths are running just over 20 inches, setting record lows since measurements began in the winter of 1954-55.

Last year it was 60 inches, and the average for this time is around 56 inches, according to data kept by the University of Vermont.

Looking for relief

Whether you blame climate change, El Niño or just Mother Nature’s whims, the devastating double whammy of the snow drought and the prevailing warm temperatures has been particularly brutal this winter.

Scott Dorwart, who runs the ski touring center at the Stowe Mountain Resort, joked that “December was the fall that never quit.”

While January brought enough snow to provide some skiing at least until early this month, the warmup into the 40s and 50s and rains wiped out what base was available on his trails and left a sheen of miserable ice when temperatures sank.

Dorwart agreed with Miller that this year is proving to be worst in his memory. Like many other touring centers, his was virtually closed last week and relying on snowshoers for any business.

Meteorologist Roger Hill, who runs his Weathering Heights forecasting service from Worcester, doesn’t see much change ahead.

“All the opportunities I have been seeing, at least for Vermont, have been negated,” he said, citing an El Niño effect that prevents arctic air from a long-term stay. El Niño, the cyclical warming trend of Pacific ocean waters, is “still way, way strong for this time of year,” he said.

The only positive in the forecast is that the last half of February and March may offer colder, snowier weather, he said.

Losers and bigger losers

Of all Vermont’s winter recreational sports venues, alpine resorts are best able to weather this winter, largely thanks to extensive snowmaking investments and upgrades in efficient high-tech equipment, says Parker Riehle, president of the Vermont Ski Areas Association, which represents 19 alpine and 30 Nordic areas.

Still, he said downhill resorts were “off substantially” over the Christmas vacation, when only 12 percent of the state’s alpine trails were open.

“It could go down as the worst December we’ve ever had,” he said. Visits rebounded around Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and resorts are hoping to gain steam in this critical Washington’s Birthday week, which can be 20 percent of resorts’ annual business.

Parker said resorts have long accepted the annual fluctuation in visits and the vagaries of being in a snow-dependent industry, and have the financial strength to get through this year after two good winter seasons.

At VAST, which has a $3.5 million annual budget, Mills said the group has begun taking steps to look at its fiscal situation and take what measures it has to. However, the snowmobiling group has reserves set aside for this kind of year and will survive, he said.

Snowmobiling is a sport likely to take a big hit because it has extensive fixed costs for trail work and a fleet of expensive trail grooming machines to pay for and maintain. VAST funds its operation through memberships, as well as state money returned from snowmobile registrations.

Mills noted that even if clubs, which get paid for grooming by the mile, have no snow to groom, VAST is on the hook for $1.1 million in baseline annual payments for the groomers, which can cost $500,000 or more.

Headquartered in Berlin, VAST built its budget on 24,000 members, but early memberships were down 20 percent this year, according to trails administrator Matt Tetreault. Overall membership is likely “to be down in numbers significantly” as well, he guessed.

“There’s not much snow and not much riding, and folks are reluctant to buy a trail pass when they can’t ride,” he said. An annual pass costs $135 for in-state and $175 for out-of-state riders. Early last week, no trails were listed open on the VAST website.

Tetreault said those hardest hit in snowmobiling will be the “mom and pop” stores, gas stations, restaurants and motels that cater to avid snowmobilers, as well as equipment dealers. “It’s a huge effect all the way down through the whole industry, and eventually into the state’s coffers for tax revenue,” he said.

Indeed, January revenues for consumption taxes in Vermont already reflect the winter woes. Sales and use taxes were down 11 percent, and meals and rooms taxes down nearly 3 percent, though increases in other tax revenues mitigated the decrease.

Challenging at Trapps

The snow drought’s impact is evident at the Trapp Family Lodge, said marketing manager Ryan Krukar. Calling the winter “challenging” so far, he estimated room bookings were down 18 percent and he’s heard from others that bookings were off 20 to 25 percent at some places.

Trapps has had limited cross-country skiing most of the winter and had to close its trails recently after warm weather wiped out the snow, forcing it to forgo hosting the SuperTour, a major ski race.

That event was transferred to Craftsbury Outdoor Center. With a big snowmaking operation and a prime location in the northern snow belt, Craftsbury been virtually the only cross-country resort to be open most of the season.

Krukar said Trapps has offset the lack of skiing with its snowshoeing offerings and by adding family programs and activities. It is also planning to expand its snowmaking, a move he said was planned in advance of this winter.

Despite the tough year, those who make a living on snow recreation have seen this before — many cite 2006 as another bad winter — and evince the fatalistic and humorous attitude similar to farmers, who know they can’t change nature.

Eric Friedman, the longtime marketing guru for Mad River Glen ski area, which has no snowmaking and has seen rocky skiing at best this year, invokes a movie plot in putting it this way: “Mad River Glen is having a rough year, but we will be back. We’re like the Revenant.”

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