Sun Valley A Bit Too Balmy For The Season Skiing On Hold As Warm Weather Prevents Even Manufacturing Snow

Denzel Rowland measures progress by degrees, and he had about 30 too many.

“What we really need is about three nights of 10-degree weather,” said Rowland, the Sun Valley Co.’s mountain manager. “If we could get that, we could make enough snow to open up a quad lift.”

But the overnight temperature in Ketchum on Wednesday was 22 degrees, not nearly cold enough to fire up the 522 automated snow-making cannons on which the company spent $16 million over the past four years.

“I’ve been working on this mountain for 20 years, and I’ve never seen a November this warm,” Rowland said. “I don’t know how this month stacks up in terms of precipitation, but it sure is warm.”

The National Weather Service will not know exactly how warm the month is until it adds up the numbers next week, but there is little to encourage people who sell snow.

“Last Nov. 22, we had a low of zero here,” said Bill Galkin, who runs the weather service’s Kimberly office. On Wednesday, it got down to 38.

“We’re making snow when we can,” said Woody Anderson, who owns Pomerelle ski resort near Albion. “And wearing out the knees on our pants praying for more.”

The wait may be a while. Southern Idaho is in the path of a series of weak Pacific storms that lose most of their moisture over the Cascade Mountains, weather service meteorologist Joel Tannenholz said.

Most of Idaho’s big winter storms originate from a huge patch of ocean near Hawaii where warm, moist air is mixed and moves north and east where it encounters colder air, which in turn produces snow, he said.

The reasons why that’s not happening now are complex, Tannenholz said, ranging from the jet stream to El Nino, the mysterious South Pacific ocean currents that may have vast effects on weather worldwide.

But Idaho skiers are not going to be hip-deep in powder until some major changes occur over the Pacific.

“And there’s a good likelihood that it will change,” he said. November tends to be one of the wettest months of the year in Boise.