Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 7, 1993 TAG: 9302080286
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B13 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BILL COCHRAN OUTDOOR EDITOR
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
FEBRUARY SNOW GUNS BURY JANUARY MOGULS
Suppose you operated your own ski resort and could concoct any kind of weather you desired.Would it be something like this? Cold nights, well below freezing, so your snow guns could crank out blizzards of puffy powder that bury all the moguls.
Then blue-sky days, bright and balmy enough to delight skiers, yet crisp enough to send them to the warming fire occasionally, so they won't deplete their glycogen stores and fall asleep after supper in their ski clothes. You want them to have energy left to keep the cash registers ringing at your slope-side night spots.
And some natural snow down in the frost pockets, like the Roanoke Valley and the New River Valley, just enough for the kind of psychological punch to give the residents an urge to head for the slopes, yet not so much that the road to your place will be treacherous.
So how has Mother Nature handled the weather assignment this season?
Well, in February she has been doing pretty well.
All you have to do is look at the weekend ski report - skiing's Dow-Jones averages - says Joe Stevens, the PR man at Snowshoe-Silver Creek in Pocahontas County, W.Va.
Snowshoe-Silver Creek has 49 of its 50 slopes open, and you might as well call that 100 percent, because the one run that isn't operating shouldn't be counted anyway, said Stevens. It is the beginner slope, called Cub Run, that is so new it doesn't have snowmaking equipment.
By today, Winterplace expects to have its whole mountain open at Flat Top, W.Va., the first time that has happened since 1989.
At Massanutten, "We have more open right now [11 of 14 slopes] than we've probably had anytime the last three or four years," said Steve Showalter. All this in time for the resort's 20th anniversary fling on Wednesday, when prices will be rolled back to the 1972 level: $7 for a lift ticket; $5 for rentals.
Canaan Valley has all of its 23 slopes open, with a snow pack of 4 feet on some of them. Neighboring Timberline has 19 of its 24 runs operating.
Wintergreen has 13 of its 17 slopes open along the spine of the Blue Ridge south of Waynesboro, with up to 40 inches of base.
"Looking at the weather forecast, we probably should get them all open, because we should be able to get into snowmaking every night of the week," said Mark Glickman, director of public relations. "The conditions are just fantastic right now."
That includes cold, snow-making nights, and bright blue-bird days.
Mother Nature, however, has made a couple of stumbles, enough, probably, to cancel out thoughts of a record season at most resorts. There was that thaw right after the New Year holiday when January suddenly turned to mush. The temperature shot up and rain fell out of low-hanging clouds. All of the resorts in North Carolina shut down, half in Virginia did, and even West Virginia's Winterplace was out of business for five days.
"You only have so many days in the ski season, and you get a week and a half of the kind of weather we had in early January that is going to hurt your numbers," said Glickman.
But early February has been as good as January was bad.
"What we are getting now is consistent cold weather," said Glickman. "It has been a lot of years since we've had weeks of consistently cold weather. The only thing that has been missing has been a good snowfall in the market place - like Roanoke - to get people fired up" said Glickman.
When you put it all together - the natural snow that fell quietly in the mountains before Christmas, the January thaw, the below-freezing nights of February - you come up with what Tom Gibson says "is probably an average season." Gibson is president of the Roanoke Ski Club.
Resort operators rate it higher than average.
"With the optimum snowmaking, we have really been able to increase our base on the terrain," said Stevens.
You really can't stockpile snow, Stevens said, but you can pile it up like a fortress against a string of warm days. Snowshoe-Silver Creek is reporting an upward depth of 60 inches.
The number of skiers at Snowshoe-Silver Creek is running ahead of last year, the second best for the resort. But Stevens gets edgy when someone mentions a record season.
"Don't jinx me," he says.
It is a long run till April 12, the day Snowshoe closed last season.
At Winterplace, Mark Cline, the general manager, says snowmaking conditions overall haven't been that great. The big difference for the resort is the addition of high-tech equipment capable of producing more than 700 tons of snow per hour when conditions are favorable.
Fifteen new airguns mounted on 40-foot towers help deliver 70 percent more snow, and that means you can bounce back much more rapidly from a thaw like the one that occured in January, said Cline.
Massanutten, near Harrisonburg, is another resort helped by a beefed up snowmaking system. It purchased Cherokee's guns, when the Linden resort had a foreclosure sale.
At Wintergreen, groomers aren't just relying on their 25 percent increase in snowmaking, but also on some thing the past three less-than-ideal seasons have taught them.
"If there is anything we have learned from the last few winters, you want to stay open," said Glickman. "What we did, we made a decision a few weeks ago that we were going to put snow down where slopes already were open, rather than try to get more slopes open. We have learned to anticipate warm weather."