ENFIELD — The end-of-the-year holidays are traditionally a crucial stretch for the ski industry in the Twin States.
And for businesses in the Upper Valley that depend upon ski tourism, it was by and large a slow end to a bad year.
On top of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and travel-related quarantines, warm temperatures and rain around Christmas washed away a thick blanket of snow dumped by a big December storm and dissolved what might have been a decent holiday week on the slopes.
A whiteout turned into a wipe-out. A Friday night snowstorm renewed promise for the weekend, although local areas on Saturday morning were still reporting only a handful of trails were ready to ski.
“Literally, my office looks out at the mountain and the mountain right now is green,” Mitchell Kelly, an assistant at Whaleback Mountain in Enfield, said from his desk at work last week. “We were open for one day before all the rain came.”
Now, as snowmaking equipment is taxed to reblanket the slopes, only Whaleback’s learning slope is open, despite several inches of snowfall that fell over Friday night.
Kelly can’t predict when Whaleback’s main trails would reopen.
“That’s a tricky thing with all the rain we got,” he said. “We’ve got to make everything all over again. So an opening is something we can’t commit to.”
At Dartmouth Skiway in Lyme, general manager Mark Adamczyk said they were open with 50% of their trails for two days after the blizzard but then had to shut down when the rain hit.
The Skiway reopened on Monday but with only 10% of its trails (as of Saturday at noon, after the late week snowfall, four of 13 trails on Winslow Mountain were open, although all 15 trails on Holt’s Mountain were still closed).
He said while the warm weather hasn’t helped, the bigger issue has been the pandemic since the Skiway has been already limiting ticket sales so as not to crowd the slopes with skiers.
“The weather would have a bigger impact on daily ticket sales were it not for the pandemic, which is making us limit our capacity,” Adamczyk said. Although season pass sales are up, daily ticket sales are down 50%, which Adamczyk attributes to state-imposed quarantine protocols in Vermont discouraging skiers from crossing the river into New Hampshire for unessential travel to spend a day on the slopes.
“When those rules came down, we had a lot of people shift their skiing to Vermont from New Hampshire,” he said.
Particularly hard hit has been the lodging sector, which has seen its winter tourism business tied to vacationing and weekend skiers, dry up.
“We’ve never seen anything like this,” said Patricia Ploss who, with her husband, has owned and operated the 12-room Braeside Motel for 30 years on Route 4 in Woodstock.
“During a normal Christmas week, we’d be completely booked with skiers and for the holiday. We have zero this week. Last year, we had a very busy January and February. This year, we have nothing on the books,” she said.
Ploss knows the reason.
“It’s absolutely COVID,” she said, which is discouraging travelers from coming to Vermont because of quarantine protocols.
Visitors to Vermont are required to quarantine for 14 days (at home, pre-arrival, is allowed if they travel to Vermont by personal vehicle), and if they have not had any symptoms and test negative on a PCR test after 7 days, they can end the quarantine then.
(New Hampshire imposes no travel-quarantine requirements on visitors from other New England states, but visitors from other states or countries face a 10-day quarantine; they can test out after seven days).
Six miles farther west on Route 4 at the 12-room Sleep Woodstock Motel near Bridgewater, owner Patrick Fultz said that he is usually booked solid on Friday and Saturday nights with guests making weekend ski trips to the Killington ski resort, which is 20 minutes away.
“So long as there’s snow, I’d sell out every weekend,” Fultz said. “But we decided because we had not one booking Christmas week and our business during winter is normally Friday and Saturdays and a little weekday, we’d close the hotel until May 1.”
Fultz said he plans to use the downtime for “doing basic maintenance.”
Ski industry businesses are also seeing a change in customer behavior and what type of skiing they are doing.
Jack Henderson, owner of Henderson’s Ski & Snowboard in Quechee, said there has been a flip-flop in his customer base.
“Daily rentals are way, way down, but seasonal leasing is up dramatically,” Henderson said. “And that means people are adhering to the quarantine, realizing that they can’t come in and rent for a day, go home and come back in five days. That’s where we are getting hurt.
“We’ve always done very well with college kids coming out, but this year we’ve not seen any of them,” he said.
Henderson said his ski shop, which he has owned for 37 years, is actually doing a little bit better this season because there has been a run on sales of cross country ski equipment.
“We’re out of cross country skis. Out of boots. Same with snowshoes. That hasn’t happened in a long time,” Henderson said, likening it to what happened this past summer when sports equipment stores ran out of bicycles, paddle boards and badminton sets.
“People want to get outdoors,” he said.
That yearning to be outdoors is benefiting Strafford Nordic Ski Center, which dropped its daily rental program this season and instead introduced seasonal rentals. The response was overwhelming.
“We’ve sold out,” said Hilary Linehan, who heads marketing for center, which maintains nearly 19 miles of cross country trails across two farm properties in Strafford. “We’re actually thinking of ordering more equipment.”
Linehan said the surge in seasonal rentals has been driven by local residents from nearby towns such as Thetford and Norwich who are picking up cross country skiing as a safe outdoor activity during the pandemic.
The problem, of course, is the vanishing of the snow in the wake of the initial December snow dump.
“We’d been open a week, and then we got rain. We do 20% of our business holiday week. So the fact we didn’t have any business that week may offset” the gain from seasonal rentals, Linehan said.
The Nordic center during holiday week had to switch back to fat-tire mountain biking because its cross country trails melted or froze.
The bigger ski resorts, with their snowmaking ability, are better able to weather the lack of snow — providing the air temperature remains cold enough.
That also can help support businesses who feed off ski resorts for customers.
Joe Tuohy, co-owner with his brothers Josh and Matt of the Salt hill Pub taverns, including Salt hill Shanty near the base of Mount Sunapee Resort in Newbury, N.H., spent Wednesday afternoon skiing on the mountain with his 13-year-old son and described the scene as “decent crowds and good skiing but limited terrain.”
Salt hill Shanty can fit 150 tables, but the Tuohys have had to reduce seating capacity to about 80 tables to comply with state health protocols.
“We’re not at 100%, but it’s easy to fill that many tables given the number of skiers coming to Mount Sunapee,” Tuohy said. “I’d go out on a limb and say 99% of our problems are COVID-related and the weather is a little bump in the road.”
Tuohy, a self-described “optimist” who grew up it the shadow of Mount Sunapee and whose parents also ran a restaurant in Newbury, said he has “seen really dry years when there was no snow and seen really great years … snow hasn’t come yet and that’s a challenge, but I think the jury is still out” about what kind of year 2021 will be.
Contact John Lippman at jlippman@vnews.com.
