While Mother Nature dealt us an extraordinarily weak hand, snowmakers perservered.
by Roger Klein // photography by Roger Klein
Spring arrived early this year. Yes, the groundhog actually got it right, but it wasn’t much of a winter either, even here in the so-called snow belt.
“It just was not normal, I call it the winter that was cancelled in Canada. I mean we saw that from coast to coast to coast,” says David Phillips, Environment Canada’s senior climatologist. Phillips lists off a myriad of unusual local weather statistics that smashed records this year. “So it wasn’t just that freezing did not occur. We saw for example the number of melting days, when the temperature gets above freezing—we normally would get 36 of those days in December, January and February. This year we had 62.”
The few prismatic snowflakes that did accumulate in the front yards of the region melted away by mid-February along with a piece of our Canadian identity. The weather kiboshed everything from pond hockey to snowmobiling while snowmaking efforts at alpine resorts salvaged something of the season for skiers and snowboarders.
Twenty-three-year-old snowboarder Macalin Green squeezed every drop out of his Blue Mountain 5×7 Pass and racked up more than 75 days on the slopes at Blue this season, where conditions were often better than he expected. “You would go there and it would be like, ‘Holy Cow! North is open!’ You get there and it’s perfect,” Green explains while visualizing corduroy mornings.
But keeping the hills snow-covered through all of the weather extremes and at the same time managing expectations was no small feat.
“This past winter was easily one of the toughest we’ve seen in the past 20 years,” says Graeme Dugale, Blue Mountain’s vice-president of mountain operations. Dugale credits detailed weather data, improvements to the resort’s snowmaking systems as well as computer automation for saving the season. “However, none of it can run or be maintained without our people,” he points out.
Now, with spring in the air, eyes are turning to winters in the future. According to David Phillips, El Niño is largely to blame for the “winter that wasn’t,” combined with other factors like warmer-than-normal ocean temperatures and the effects of climate change, which he likens to adding a wild card to the climate deck. “You have 52 cards. You know the chance of that joker coming up is pretty rare. Climate change is like adding jokers to the deck. It’s like saying, ‘OK, instead of one, we’re going to have four,’” says Phillips. With the El Niño cycle showing signs of fading, Phillips anticipates more normal winters ahead.
In the meantime, Blue Mountain Resort will continue to focus on sustainability and invest in snowmaking while diversifying its offering of activities. “We’ve become incredibly resilient over our 80-plus years of operating and are ultimately confident in our ability to adapt. Winter at Blue isn’t going anywhere,” says Dugale.
That’s good news for Green, whose unquenchable passion for riding never gears down. “I’m looking forward to the terrain park. I’m also looking forward to those sunny days like we had this year—and the Big Air event. I’m really hyped to see that again and definitely getting my early bird pass deal because last year I missed it,” Green recalls.
Blue Mountain offers spring pricing discounts on its 5×7 Pass until April 25, and early bird pricing from April 26 to October 17.
