Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, December 12, 1994                   TAG: 9412130007
SECTION: SPORTS                    PAGE: C10   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: BILL COCHRAN OUTDOOR EDITOR
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Long

SKI

The Homestead Ski Area is 35 years old; Sugar Mountain Resort is 25; Snowshoe and Wintergreen are both 20.

There will be celebrations, ranging from a winter light show that will cover the entire lower half of Sugar Mountain to Ski Appreciation Days at Wintergreen, where $20 will buy you 1970s music, a lift ticket, rental equipment and a lesson, which is about 40 percent off the regular rate.

But, thus far, there has been little icing for the cake. Mild weather has held the 1994-95 ski season captive. Snowshoe and Sugar Mountain opened their gates Thanksgiving Day, but by the following Monday balmy rain had made mush of the snow at Sugar. Snowshoe last week was telling callers to expect bare spots and to "be aware and ski with care."

The almost mile-high West Virginia resort postponed the media day it had scheduled for last weekend.

"We probably will have it in January," said Chris Canfield, the public relations director.

Other resorts were watching weather maps - and hoping. Preliminary opening dates were being abandoned, and inquiries about when the gates would open were being fielded with increasing vagueness.

"We will be open absolutely the very first day after two days and two nights of snow making," said Steve Showalter, the ski manager at Massanutten Village.

Sepp Kober, of The Homestead, was beginning to fret over the fact that the lucrative Christmas-to-New Year's ski period is just two weeks away.

But there has been no panic.

"If we go into late December and it still is like this, we will have some concerns," said Canfield. "We have been spoiled for the last two years."

By the end of last week, the mountain weather report contained the words "snow possible," and there was the promise of colder temperatures.

The irony is that this year's sluggish starts follow one of the best seasons in recent memory, a record year for several resorts. Timberline's business was up 21 percent last season, according to Rhonda Turman, the marketing director. Snowshoe had more than 400,000 skiers visit, a record. The Southeastern ski business increased 19 percent, the largest of any region across the nation.

"The Southeast is the hottest thing going in skiing," said Canfield. Well, maybe "hottest" isn't the best choice of terms.

Resorts are poised to assault the mountains with snowguns at the slightest dip in the temperature. What's more, they can conquer their slopes quicker than ever, thanks to major increases in snow making.

Some 1,500 tons of snow per hour can come thundering out of the guns at Snowshoe.

"That will cover a football field with snow, 12 inches deep, per hour," said Canfield.

Nearly every resort has boosted its snow-making capabilities, but few more forceably than Wintergreen where there has been a $1 million snow-making expansion.

"That enables us to increase our snow-making capacity by close to 90 percent in temperatures that are in the 25-to-30-degree range," said Mark Glickman, director of public relations. "For us, that accounts for about 70 percent of our snow-making time during the course of the season. We will have faster slope openings and we will be able to replenish our snow surfaces quicker throughout the ski season."

The new snow-making equipment makes old-timers in the business chuckle about what they used in the early days.

"When I think of the first snow making we had here in '59, those guns looked like garden sprinklers," said Kober, who often is called the Father of Southern Skiing. "They turned around like sprinklers. You couldn't cover much area. You had to move them and move them. But at that time we had so much natural snow. The first 10 years we had snow over snow. Sometimes I wondered why we had snow-making equipment."

Last season was a return of the "good old years." Snowshoe got 223 inches of natural snowfall, and that doesn't reflect the fact that the measuring device was out of whack for one week, said Canfield.

There were wispy snowfalls in the valleys, too, the kind that cling to every tree branch, creating a Christmas card scene and making lowlanders think skiing.

The resulting enthusiasm has catapulted into the new season. Reservations are up as much as 35 percent at some resorts.

"I have never seen interest any higher than it has been the last 30 days," said Showalter. "We have already booked over 100 groups this season. If the weather would get cold and stay cold for a couple of days, it would be just phenomenal."

Even though ski resorts remain a "weather permitting" operation, in many other ways they have matured, a fact that will be evident to visitors this season. Everything from parking lots to rental shops have been expanded for the new year. There are new runs, a broader emphasis on snowboarding, and expanded children's programs.

The latter is an indication that the Southeastern skiing business isn't just growing older, but growing up. No longer is it just a passion of the adventurous and hare-brained; in fact, "family" is a buzz-word often repeated at resorts.

"What we are seeing in the demographic of skiing, skiers are young and are starting to have families," said Canfield. "For ski resorts to stay on top of this trend, in addition to marketing your night clubs and after-skiing fun we better also start marketing child care and children's ski schools."

"We now take 4-year-olds, said Massanutten's Showalter.

That should mean excellent skiers in the future. Right now, 38 percent of the skiers in the Southeast didn't take up the sport until they were past age 25, said Canfield.

While some have excelled in the sport, research shows that 42 percent of the skiers in the Southeast rate their skills as low intermediate or below.

With that in mind, Snowshoe built two new "green" level (easier) trails for this season and is promoting the wide, gentle slopes of its Silver Creek as a place for visitors to develop skills. Winterplace has given beginners more access with a new slope called "No Problem,"