Ski resorts struggle to attract when city is snowless

As Bob Duppstadt drove down the Pennsylvania Turnpike Monday evening, he noticed a major… As Bob Duppstadt drove down the Pennsylvania Turnpike Monday evening, he noticed a major problem plaguing the local ski industry.

Driving from Seven Springs Mountain Resort in Champion, Pa., Duppstadt – who is the resort’s marketing manager – began his trip toward Pittsburgh in a “nightmare” of snowfall.

But just a few miles down the turnpike, as he passed the Donegal exit, Duppstadt said the snow lightened up considerably.

“[Seven Springs] got a bunch of snow – about eight inches in the past 36 hours,” Duppstadt said Tuesday morning, “and Pittsburgh didn’t get more than a dusting.”

Despite the coating of snow on Tuesday, the fluctuating temperatures and long periods without snow in recent winters have caused challenges not so much for local ski resorts’ slope operators, but for their marketing departments.

“The No. 1 marketing tool that any ski area can have is snow in people’s backyard,” Duppstadt said.

As long-term snow accumulation dwindles and temperatures change drastically from above and below freezing during the past few winters, local ski resorts say they have experienced a drop in customers, despite the slopes being open.

According to Duppstadt, as low-elevation communities – including Pittsburgh – experience warmer weather in winter months, novice skiers tend to assume there isn’t any snow on the slopes.

After last year, a winter season Duppstadt called “one of the most challenging winters in the last 25 years,” this season’s pass holders have actually increased. But the pass holders – who range from mid-week pass holders to full-season pass holders – aren’t the problem, Duppstadt said.

Day pass guests, or “transient guests” as he calls them, cause the greatest void in ticket sales. Transient guests, as Duppstadt explained, are usually beginner skiers and snowboarders who tend to only visit once or twice a year for just a day at a time.

For these transient guests, the perception that no snow in the city means no snow on the slopes is common, Duppstadt said.

Snowfall in Pittsburgh has dropped from numbers in the 50-inch range in 2004 to numbers in the 20s and 30s the past two years.

As of Jan. 14, Pittsburgh has only seen 10.6 inches this year, according to Josh Newhard, a meteorologist with AccuWeather.

“Last year we saw large swings in the weather,” Newhard said, “going from warm to cold and then back to warm again.”

This frequent change in temperatures, he said, makes the accumulation statistic for last year misleading. Despite the fact that last year saw 35.3 inches of snowfall, the warmer temperatures often came quickly after the fact and melted any accumulation.

Pittsburgh’s average winter temperatures have risen steadily, according to Newhard’s data. In the 2002-03 winter season, the average temperature was 30 degrees. Since then, each year’s average temperature has slowly risen to 35.6 degrees this year.

On Jan. 8, temperatures in Pittsburgh reached 70 degrees. And even though the sun was shining in Western Pennsylvania, 28 of Seven Springs’ 45 slopes were still open, although most of them had bare spots, director of ski operations Dick Barron said.

But while warmer weather doesn’t necessarily keep the slopes closed, it does force ski resorts to spend more money to insure that the slopes have an ideal base depth of snow, Barron said. And that’s where the lower customer numbers hit hardest.

“Our biggest expense in making snow is the energy it takes to operate the air compressors, which are driven by fuel oil,” Barron explained. “With the prices of oil escalating, so is our cost for making snow.”

Doug Finger, manager of Laurel Mountain State Park, which once included the Laurel Mountain Ski Resort, has seen how costly maintaining ski slopes can be. Laurel Mountain’s ski slopes closed two winters ago when Seven Springs, who operated the slopes in the 2004-05 season, decided not to return as the operator.

The mountain had to be remade with snow three separate times throughout the final season before the slopes closed the following year. Each time Laurel Mountain remade the slopes, it cost $50,000.

Because of the warmer temperatures in past years, ski areas have to constantly find new ways of telling people that the slopes have snow, Finger said.

Interactive web cams have become one of the more popular additions to ski resorts’ websites because they allow anyone with Internet access to see what the conditions on the mountain look like.

“People can be sitting at home on a Sunday morning, 41 degrees outside and check out what’s happening at Seven Springs or Hidden Valley,” Finger said.

Some ski resorts, including Seven Springs, have issued ski reports through various media from radio to print. At Pittsburgh Penguins games the ski conditions are announced during intermission.

This past summer, the Buncher Company bought Hidden Valley Resort, located near Laurel Mountain, and has since updated technologies in nearly every area of the resort, said Bill Doring, vice president and treasurer of the Buncher Company.

The Buncher Company, in their first winter season, purchased an entirely new snowmaking system that automatically senses climate changes such as wind, humidity and temperature in order to regulate snow production.

This new machinery, Doring said, allows them to make snow, even in the warmer days of the winter, so that they can stay open.

But while fewer customers than they would like are taking advantage of the new technologies, Doring suggested that a slow first year may be better than an overly busy one.

“It’s a learning experience,” he said.

For some year-round resorts such as Hidden Valley, warm weather activities such as golf offer a small amount of compensation for the high cost and low revenue.

But as Seven Springs’ Duppstadt said, from a financial standpoint not every resort has the safety net of four-season activities.

“For smaller ski areas that may not have, or do not have much of, a four-season product,” he explained, “winter is everything.”