Grays On Trays

If you can’t get enough snowboarding, there’s no reason to put your board away just yet.
According to OnTheSnow.com, the following North American resorts are still open:

• Alyeska (Alaska)
• Sunshine Village (Alberta)
• Whistler/Blackcomb (British Columbia)
• Alpine Meadows (California)
• Mammoth Mountain (California)
• Squaw Valley (California)
• Arapahoe Basin (Colorado)
• Mt. Bachelor (Oregon)
• Timberline Lodge (Oregon)

OnTheSnow also has a smaller list of resorts for which they have a projected closing date.

If  you’ve never gone snowboarding in May, give it a try. The sunshine is great, the bitter cold of winter is long gone, and you can cap off the day with a beverage or two at an outside picnic table AND work on your tan.

As I looked out my kitchen window this morning, I saw an unusual sight: 3 inches of new snow. Had this happened a month ago, I would have been happy. Now I’m simply annoyed.

Why? While the season for snowboarding and skiing continues in some places in the Rockies, here in the Midwest it’s all but over, with only one or two areas still open. The nearest one is 4-5 hours away. Any place within a short drive has been closed for at least one week, and in most cases, longer than that. They’re not going to re-open, and the little snow that we’ve received isn’t enough to be useful.

At this point, the new snow is simply signals a delay of the coming of summer.

So at this time of the year, in this place, I say “down with snow!”

My least favorite season of the year? Spring. The opening of the flowers? The woods coming to life? Meh. All I know is that spring has the cold of winter but none of the fun of snow.

On a totally subjective note, I’ve decided that the most useless weather happens when the daily high is between 34 and 60F. In that range, it’s too cold to (pleasantly) play a round of golf or ride a bike. And unless you live in the mountains, where snow can linger, it’s too warm for snowboarding.

So how long is the “bleah” time of year? Too long. The National Weather Service keeps records of recorded temperatures. For the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, the average daily high exceeds 34 starting on March 4. After that, you’re snowboarding on borrowed time; in my experience, you might have decent conditions through St. Patrick’s Day (March 17), but after that, it’s time to put away the board–or plan a trip to higher elevations.

The average daily high doesn’t hit 60 until April 21. So at least in my part of the world, there are about 5 week of unpleasant weather, filled with cold, damp air, wind, and rain.

Of course, there are about 5 weeks in the fall when the average daily high drops into the 34 to 60 degree range. But at least you’ve got some beauty of the leaves turning color–and anticipation of snow.

On the other hand, I can’t get through spring fast enough.

Spring is in the air.

For the record, I hate spring.

Cold is good if it’s not wet. Windy is good if it’s not cold. Spring combines all three qualities into one unpleasant package. It’s wet, windy, and cold. It’s also ugly, with overcast skies, water that collects in the streets, melting snow that is dingy and has lost all its charm, and a dull-green and brown soggy ground that makes Army green fatigues look bright and cheery.

The teenaged boy who lives next door is playing basketball in his driveway. In February. In Minnesota. That’s just wrong. Return, winter!

Sure enough, it will. We usually get a good dumping of snow in March. And the ski hills have a good supply of snow stockpiled, ready to spread out across the slopes.

It’s times like this, by the way, that good snowmaking and grooming show their worth.

Of course, travel to the mountains is also an option.

Since we’re in the days when just a few lift-served areas are open, I’m sympathetic to the argument advanced by Scott Willoughby in today’s Denver Post.

He notes that most ski areas in Colorado are now closed, despite having record snowfall. For example, “Despite ample remains of the second-snowiest winter of all time in Vail and the deepest ever next door at Beaver Creek, those two areas are shut down until summer, with resort officials citing a lack of staff and interest to keep lifts running even on weekends.”

I suppose if you’ve had the opportunity to ride and ski all winter, and especially if you live within driving distance of the mountains, you’re going to say after a while “No, I think I’ll go golfing today,” no matter how much snow is left on the mountains. For you see, feeble customer demand closes many lifts before lack of snow cover does. For those of us who travel to the mountains for a visit, that is an especially sad state of affairs.

Though he may be–to toss in a summer metaphor–swimming upstream, he suggests that ski areas address their staffing problems by starting their seasons later, and running the lifts later in the spring.

“If,” he says, “the large ski resorts are in such a bind to find even a skeleton crew to man the mountains while there still is so much snow on the slopes, they should consider providing what most ski resort employees seek in the first place — more skiing, not less.”

The problem, he says, is that the calendar is out of whack.

“Ultimately, it amounts to timing, and a bit more flexibility on the corporate skiing front. As it now stands, the big-league resorts are all about opening days surrounding the Thanksgiving holiday — when snow is unreliable at best. It makes more sense to push the opener back into December — as Mother Nature forced many to do this season — and target a conditions-warranted closing date for at least a few lifts of, say, Cinco de Mayo, that will send employees off to mud season in Mexico with a bona fide fiesta. If the snow arrives early, skiers and staff will only be champing at the bit.”

I detect an anti-corporate feel to the article, which highlights the love/hate relationship that is easy for riders and skiers to have: deep pockets such as Intrawest and Vail Resorts install plenty of high-speed lifts to get us to the top of the mountains, but the accounting department rules the roost: not enough profit? Shut down the lifts.

Should there be a calendar shift? I’d like to see it. But unless “the market”–that is, the collective decisions of millions of riders and skiers–expresses an interest and more importantly buys the late-season tickets that are available, it won’t happen.

Think it’s too late in the year to go snowboarding? Not if you know where to look.

As of today, 38 ski areas tracked by the site Snocountry.com are still open.

A good number of those are in Europe, but in North America, riders still have 14 choices for riding, ranging from Sugarloaf in Maine to Whistler in British Columbia.

I haven’t checked the anticipated closing dates of each of these areas, but do your homework and you should find somewhere to ride for at least another month. Granted, spring conditions require a different attitude and challenge your skills in ways that, say, late January snow does not. But late-season riding is another way to grow as a snowboarder.

It’s the day after Thanksgiving. The sun is out, and the local ski areas are open for business today. And I’m in my office, cleaning up.

Sigh.

Writing in the Boston Globe, Tony Chamberlain makes the case for avoiding early season skiing and snowboarding, and instead putting the emphasis on the end of the season:

“Not that I mind the battle of press releases that goes on this season — hey, it looks good to have your lifts running first — but it seems an awful lot of expense and psychic energy gets wasted to market snowsports in the thinnest of seasons. Skiers and riders would do better to stay interested through March and into April, when the cover is still usually deep and the climate most genial.”

As I noticed last season, the best days of riding may be in mid-to-late February and March, not early December and certainly not November–unless you live in the high mountains, at least. I figure that I’ve got only a limited number of days that I can leave my work behind for a day on the snow and in the sun; I’m simply swapping a marginal day today for one, much better is my hope, later on.

Some of the best times are the off-times.

If you time it right, the off-season, or the near-off season, can be a great time to … well, do a lot of things. Hotel rates in resort areas can be cheaper, the crowds are smaller, and sometimes there’s a delicious ambiance that you won’t find any other time.

You can see this principle at work in golf, for example. It’s easy to think of golf as a summer event, or (since the Masters tournament is coming up this week), a spring and summer event. Yet my favorite time to golf is in the fall, when “a good walk spoiled” is a fantastic way to savor the crisp air and foliage.

In the same way, nearly off-season skiing and snowboarding has its own delights, as I’ve written before.

I spent much of yesterday at Spirit Mountain, in Duluth, Minnesota. When talking with one of the staffers there, I joked that it was appropriate that my last day in the Midwest would have been April Fool’s day. After all, some people might think that only a fool would venture out to the slopes on April 1.

But the conditions were pretty good. The snow was of course mashed potato-like in many places, but it was only partly, not totally lumpy. The edges of the runs had shrunk, of course, but the too-warm-to-slide-on patches of snow were (for the most part) easily avoidable.

If you like getting up speed in the halfpipe, it was a bad day. But for someone who likes to try it out from time to time but is cautious about getting too much speed, it was a great day. And it was also a good day for cruising, or, as my riding partners like to do, bomb it down the hill.

A bonus feature of Duluth is that you can some good water views as well as some birding. A couple of times we saw a bald eagle, and the view of St. Louis bay, and Lake Superior were fantastic.

That ugly time of year is in sight: early Spring. The snow has melted away from most of the neighbor’s yards. There is still a 3 foot pile in my front yard, but the ribbon of snow I packed in for a few joyrides is about gone. And the morning fog is a killer of snow–or rather, a sign that the white stuff is on the way out.

That said, there’s a reason that you pay $30 for a lift ticket at your local hill, and more at mountain resorts. There are lifts to run and maintain, of course, and liability insurance, not to mention the hope of some profit. But there is also the all-important activity of snowmaking. So call your local ski area and see what their base is.

Me, I think I’ve got another week around here. Then it’s time to head north.