It’s neither the best of times nor the worst of times so far this winter for the Upper Valley’s smaller ski mountains, where hundreds of skiers and snowboarders of all ages and abilities found fewer than half of trails open this past weekend.
Considering how often January thaws have cut into snow depths and business over the last quarter century, Whaleback Mountain in Enfield, Dartmouth Skiway in Lyme Center and Suicide Six in South Pomfret all were counting their blessings on Sunday.
The Skiway in particular buzzed with skiers from the Ford Sayre youth program, Dartmouth students and families with small kids, who took turns forming long lines at the lifts and crowding the base lodge while a north wind blew squalls of snow between Winslow and Holts Ledges.
“(Saturday) was our busiest day this year, which surprised us for the first weekend back after the holidays,” Skiway general manager Doug Holler said upon returning to the base lodge from the top of Holts Ledge at mid-afternoon. “We had 700 people come through (Saturday) and it’s a decent day today.”
Thanks to nights chilly enough to make snow, a timely layering of the natural stuff this past Wednesday and air temperatures in the low and mid-30s for much of the weekend, there were just enough of a base and comfortable enough footing and air to keep Owen Schneider busy at the lift-ticket counter at Whaleback.
“We had a lot of business coming through (Saturday),” Schneider said after selling day passes to four Upper Valley teen boys. “That two inches of powder we got really helps, so that people aren’t worried about skiing on straight ice.”
More forgiving surfaces brought a lot of “beginner traffic” to Suicide Six over the holidays as well as this weekend, according outdoor-programs director Christina Mattsson.
“With every thaw we’ve had, it’s been very cold immediately after, so we’e been able to make snow that night and resurface,” Mattsson said. “Even though regular visitor traffic was down a little over the holidays, we were exceptionally busy with lessons, really jamming. The one thing to be said about iffy conditions is that people are looking for instruction, especially for their kids, to deal with terrain of all kinds.”
Even without the help of the midweek snowfall, Etna resident Rick Hughes would have brought his sons Bodie, 4, and Tanner, 3, to Whaleback on Sunday.
“I’d rather have them outside as much as we can, even if the conditions aren’t perfect,” Hughes, a 1992 Hanover High graduate who’s now a lawyer, said while the boys ate lunch. “Today it’s been fine. They’ve been having a good time out there.
“Early on in the season the snow was great for a while, but Whaleback didn’t really benefit from that because they weren’t open yet, and then we had that rainy spell. That’s just the way winters have been going lately, it seems, from one extreme to another.”
At the lift-ticket counter, Schneider, a 2018 graduate of Mascoma Valley Regional High School, described this year’s conditions as “pretty average: The tendency has been for a tough start, then it snows more toward the end of the season.”
Those two inches of snow at midweek left Whaleback, after grooming, with a foot at its base, which sits at 1,100 feet above sea level, and about with two feet at the 1,800-foot summit, allowing the mountain to open 10 of its 30 trails.
At the Skiway, where eight of the 22 trails were open on Sunday, Holler estimated that two or three inches fell at the Skiway’s base (just shy of 1,000 feet) for a net coverage of 12 inches, and five inches cloaked the summit (just short of 2,000) for a total of 20 inches.
“The rain right after Christmas wasn’t ideal,” Dartmouth sophomore Mikaela O’Brien, a Montreal-born member of the school’s ski team, said between runs at the Skiway. “The conditions are a little better today.”
Skiers at Suicide Six were using six of the 23 trails, with reported snow depths of 11 inches at the 550-foot base and 30 at the 1,200-foot summit.
“If we get the kind of snow we’re supposed to later this week,” Whaleback’s Schneider said, “we hope to get the whole mountain open.”
This week, the National Weather Service is predicting anywhere from 4 to 8 inches of snow at elevations of more than 1,000 feet in the Upper Valley.
In his 18th winter at the Skiway, Holler isn’t counting his chickens — or his inches.
“We pay attention to the forecasts, but the way they change, we take it all with a grain of salt,” Holler said. “It’s an inexact science.”
What matters more, he added, is subfreezing temperatures for the snowmaking guns.
Cooler nights also allowed Whaleback and Suicide Six to bolster their bases.
With guns blazing over the holiday school vacation, the Lebanon Outing Club’s Storrs Hill ski area near downtown was able to open on Dec. 28.
Starting Thursday night and running through Sunday, daytime highs are expected to top out in the low to mid teens above zero, while nighttime lows should hover around the single numbers above and below zero.
“That’s when we’ll be able to make real progress,” Holler said. “We can put out about 1,500 gallons of water a minute, thanks to a high water table this year.”
Holler also doesn’t expect those temperatures to scare away most devoted skiers.
“Way back when, all we had was cotton and wool,” he said. “Now we’ve got all kinds of fabrics and fibers to protect us.
“There’s little reason to complain about the cold.”
David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews.com and at 603-727-3304.