Photo: Cristina Munteanu//Unsplash
According to findings released by America’s National Redundancy Department of Repetitiveness (ANRDR), a record number of ski resorts in the West announced they’d set new season snow total records this winter. The study compiled news headlines, press releases, and social media posts from more than eleventy resorts in the Wasatch, the Sierras, the Rockies, and other regions west of the Mississippi, finding that more resorts than ever before have just experienced historic levels of powder days, gloating about their ever-growing snowpack.
“We might have our first ever year-round season,” says Ryan Chan, a liftie at one Colorado resort who’s just learned his services will now be needed through the entire summer. “I’m thinking about buying a house with all the extra money I’ll make working more than six months this year.”
Indeed, the historic winter that brought more than 700 inches to resorts in the Sierra before April, and dumped nearly 800 inches on resorts in Utah in the same time period, will have far-reaching impacts in American mountain towns. Chan explains that in previous seasons, he’d sit by the phone and wait for a local resort to offer him work earlier and earlier in the season. Now it’s all flipped.
“Resorts used to race to be the first to open,” he says. “So the game was who can turn on the snow machines first, to the point that we were throwing Opening Day parties before Halloween and people were bombing down grass-and-rock-covered groomers.”
Julia Schroeder, an administrator at the ANRDR who oversaw the new survey says now the trend will flip. No longer will resorts race to open first.
“They’ve kind of backed themselves into a corner by touting their record snow totals,” she says. “Opening in early October isn’t as sexy as it used to be. The new hot commodity will be closing somewhere around mid-September, I think, and then reopening October 1.”
Chan says he already has his two-week vacation mapped out: an off-season heli-skiing trip in New Zealand.
Editor’s Note: Johnny Utah is an “Eff-Bee-Eye” agent and an expert in satire. More of his investigative work can be found here.
