Fresh snow keeps ski season on track
BOISE – Storms rolling into Idaho and the rest of the northern Rocky Mountains this week filled valleys with rain but left snow above 5,000 feet, averting a repeat of the 2005 ski season when a soggy deluge over Christmas closed or limited operations at resorts that rely on the holiday for a big chunk of their revenue.
Resort operators in Idaho say the season has started with promise, despite predictions of a 2006 reappearance of the El Nino weather pattern. That’s the weak, warm ocean current off the coast of South America that often results in warmer-than-usual temperatures in Idaho, even as it dumps snow on states farther south such as Colorado that have been hit by recent blizzards.
“When they’re calling for El Nino, we can’t wring our hands,” Gretchen Anderson, spokeswoman for Bogus Basin Mountain Resort near Boise, said Wednesday. Bogus Basin had received 7 inches of new snow since Tuesday.
A storm moving east through the state Wednesday brought more than good news for skiers and snowboarders who pump about $225 million annually into Idaho’s economy.
Jay Breidenbach, a federal hydrologist in Boise, said this winter is shaping up as the second straight with normal or above-normal moisture. That’s helping erase memories of the seven-year drought that plagued Idaho starting in the late 1990s, emptying reservoirs, parching fields and exacerbating conflicts between farmers and ranchers over water, the West’s most valuable resource.
Schweitzer Mountain Resort in North Idaho reported 9 inches of new snow since Tuesday. Sun Valley, the state’s best-known resort, has gotten a foot of snow in two days.
In the Idaho Panhandle, total precipitation so far this year is 137 percent of average. In the mountains north of Boise, precipitation was 114 percent of average. Only one of Idaho’s 19 river basins where snowfall is measured had less precipitation than the annual average, a figure based on measurements from the past four decades.
“This is probably one of the best starts we’ve had in forever,” said Patrick Sande, a spokesman at Schweitzer near Sandpoint.
The resort has received 170 inches of snow so far, half its yearly average.