123 Days

A field in Grafton, Vermont three weeks ago.

As I write, it is the last week of March, the mid-day temperatures are hovering around the freezing mark outside my front door, and it’s been flurrying lightly on-and-off all day. With those details, and only those details in mind, it’s a pretty normal day in Vermont for this time of year. Unfortunately, those are not the pertinent details. Last week, for the entirety of the week beginning on March 18th, the temperatures were hot. Africa hot. Ridiculously, astonishingly hot.

On Sunday, the 18th, I saw several firsts. I saw snow melting so fast on our bump runs that water – clear, blue water – was pooling in the troughs of our zipper-line bumps and cascading from one trough to the next. Trails that in the morning were skiing well were virtually impassable by the end of the day. Water was literally pouring out of the forest floor, choking the culverts and seasonal stream beds. The creeks that run underneath some of our lifts had so much runoff in them that what began in the morning as a slow, murky normal-looking flow evolved into clear fast-moving water by the day’s end. Water was moving everywhere, filling every ditch, divot and dent, beneath sunny blue skies on an otherwise glorious day. The most amazing feature of that day, however, was the morning fog. As the lifts began turning at Okemo, the base areas and all of Ludlow’s low-lying river valleys were filled with an incredibly dense fog that was also incredibly cold. I began my first lift ride of the day concerned that I had underdressed. Immediately upon rising above the fog on the lift, I was hit from the side with a genuinely hot wind, such that with five feet of elevation rise the temperature increased fifteen degrees Fahrenheit (and that’s conservative)! Absolutely bizarre, and it stayed that way until the fog lifted by late morning, bringing the heat all the way down to the base of the resort.

On Thursday and Friday of last week, I attended a PSIA event at Mount Snow, a bit more than an hour south of here, and drove down there in flip flops and shorts. Comfortably and, I might add, happily. I’d never seen anything like it – the highs on Thursday were in the mid-70’s Fahrenheit and on Friday it hit 80 (that’s almost 27 degrees Celsius)! I can’t believe that none of the many instructors attending events there suffered from heat stroke. I still can’t believe it. By the end of the day on Thursday, each route open to skiing from the top of Mount Snow to the base of the resort required at least some walking across mud that separated the snow fields. The very idea of a trail being divided into “snow fields” at a resort that recently invested in a couple of hundred fan guns (the latest technology in snowmaking) is difficult to contemplate.

Needless to say, despite heroic efforts by our mountain operations team all season long, Okemo shut for the season this past Sunday, March 25. Whether it’s a result of Mother Nature working against us or simply never showing up this year is something that will be the subject of much conversation over beers in Ludlow this summer, but winter never really showed up. I’m not sure what our total snowfall was for the 2011-12 season, but it was small. Very small. Add to it unusually warm weather throughout and the dearth of natural snow left us totally and completely reliant on snowmaking – thank Heavens we’re so good at it here. Amazingly, I actually managed to have a reasonably good season on the hill, thanks in no small part to a wide range of responsibilities here and elsewhere and some very keen, very enthusiastic, very devoted and very tough guests with whom I ski. In a normal season it is the guests that keep me focused and enjoying my work here in the mountains, and this year my gratitude to them and to our terrific staff is immense and hard to quantify. Thanks to everyone for keeping my spirits afloat – literally, I suppose.

Our season here at Okemo began three weeks late and ended about three weeks early, and left us with 123 days of skiing and riding. That’s it. Honestly, in a winter like this one, Okemo is an especially great place to work, with all the stresses and frustrations that accompany a career devoted to snow that never really arrived. I am certain that the effects on our business will be ongoing for a few years to come. I am equally certain that the prognosis for our resort is good, from a financial perspective and for our spirits. Next winter will be snowier. It has to be. And I’m willing to bet the ranch on it.