Low snowpack and high temperatures have jeopardized ski resorts across the region this year. While some resorts have held on, most have been facing closures or abnormally short seasons. Skiers are canceling trips, and seasonal workers have had to shift their plans for work during this abnormal winter. Mountain towns are facing major economic uncertainty — some offering major sales on gear, or pivoting to warm-weather recreation. Mt. Hood Meadows is the latest ski resort to announce its closure — it will officially wrap up this year’s operations on April 12, as it announced in a recent blog post.
Greg Pack is the president and general manager at Mt. Hood Meadows. He’ll join us to discuss the weather’s impact on this year’s ski season.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. A dismal ski season in the Northwest is coming to a close. At Mt. Hood Meadows, the largest downhill operator on the mountain, the season did not start until the end of December. It was the latest start in about 30 years. Now it’s going to end early. Meadows announced last week that the final day of operations will be Sunday, April 12. So a really tough year. But what makes it scarier for skiers is the fear that with climate change, this is just a taste of what’s to come. Greg Pack is the president and general manager of Mt. Hood Meadows. He joins us now. It’s great to have you on Think Out Loud.
Greg Pack: Thanks for having me, Dave.
Miller: I use the word dismal there because that is personally the most honest word for me as a skier, or maybe sometimes this season I should say as a would-be or wannabe skier. How would you describe this winter?
Pack: Well, we wouldn’t hire you as our marketing guy, I’ll tell you that.
Miller: That’s not my job. I’m a journalist.
Pack: Well, we call it challenging. We’ve faced this before. It seems like every 10 years or so we’ll have a down snow year. This is definitely one of those, with the opening late and trying to manage through it, but it’s challenged us every step of the way.
Miller: In an update last week, your team wrote this: “Our team has been working hard day and night all season long to get this mountain into the best shape it can be with the conditions and cards we’ve been dealt.” Can you give us a sense for what’s been happening at night and behind the scenes to make the most of the limited snow that’s fallen?
Pack: We have to get really creative in years like this. We actually harvest snow from our parking lot, so we won’t put down gravel early season. We won’t have ODOT plow the lots because it is a snow park. We’ll push it into piles and then we’ll take that, put it into snow cat dump trucks, and then haul it around the mountain to some key areas where we always need a little bit of extra snow. But this year, we continued snow hauling throughout the entire season. So anytime it snowed, we were going to all reaches of our permit area to grab snow on the mountain, in the parking lots, and had to really reconstruct some of the areas of our mountain because they were just melting away and not a big enough base.
So our snowcat drivers who have just crushed it. I mean, we’re getting so many great guest comments from it, cause you could look around on your drive up or just look around the mountain, and there was no snow anywhere except on the trails where they were putting it. And every single night, they’d have to put it back cause, it’s unbelievable, but each skier can move about a million pounds of snow in a day with all the turns, so they grab it from the…
Miller: Wait, wait, I’ve never heard that. One skier can move a million pounds of snow by just turning and turning and turning over the course of a day?
Pack: I better Google that, but I think I did. Maybe you have to use ChatGPT, but that is correct. It’s right around that number. So if somebody’s skiing the entire day, that’s how much snow they move. So a snowcat has to take that where they push it from the uphill side to the downhill side and kind of bring it back up and let it set up and groom it. So it’s been very challenging on them, but we celebrated them a number of times just for all their hard work, and they were way into it. They just were like, hey, they’re proud of what they’re doing, and we are proud of how they’re able to make it happen.
Miller: How late on average do you go into the spring?
Pack: Usually we go in about the first week of May. And a few years ago, we went to the third week of May just because we had a little bit later start, but then the snow came in heavy and we had a really good base. We’re like, let’s keep this going. Let’s give as much skiing and riding to our guests as we can. So we decided to stay open. But May is the right time. Unfortunately, Dave, like the economics of the business, usually in April you start going backwards. And you’ll see like most major resorts in like Colorado, where they close the first week of April because they know they’re losing money.
We do too, but we want to honor our pass holders and our guests and provide the longest season we can, so we continue to do it. But this year we could just see the writing on the wall, and we really wanted to give people as much notice as possible instead of what we were seeing out there where there were resorts out on Friday, just make an announcement saying, hey, we’re closing Sunday, like that’s it. We could see it coming. We know what our base is. We want to give everybody as much notice as possible.
Miller: Well, what did go into that decision to shut down again? This is two Sundays from now, so this is on the 12th of April. What actually went into that decision?
Pack: Our snowpack, the snow water equivalent, there’s a formula for doing that. It’s really the snow depth and density and the snow or the water equivalency of each. It’s 21 right now, and normally that’s like 53 or 54. So we’re only at about 232 inches of snow so far this season, we could be close to 400 in most. So as you look around the area, we already had to close Hood River Meadows, which is at much lower elevation, that’s at 4,500 ft.
Miller: Just to be clear, that’s the lower part of the mountain. There’s another place where you can park there and there’s a lift that takes you to the sort of central area of the mountain, but that’s lower elevation. That’s been closed for weeks, right?
Pack: Yeah, we had to close it. We were putting it together and just allowing people to ride back down to their vehicles at the end of the day, not laughed at for a while. In fact, the cat drivers were like, please, Greg, don’t let anybody ski or ride on this. We can put it back together, but it’ll only hold up for a couple of hours. So yeah, we did that. We knew that was going. If you look around our base area and you look up at some of the trails and some of the south facing trails, the snow’s just gone. We know the snow depth. Our teams, we have a ton of people who’ve worked here a long time, 30 plus years, 40, 50. They’ve seen it. We just all got together and said, can we make this happen? Reality is, we knew it wasn’t going to happen, so announced it early.
Miller: What has this meant for your employees? I mean, you were talking about the snowcat operators, but there’s also been sort of people who are grooming. There’s also lift operators. There’s back end folks, there’s people who work in the lodge, instructors. Not only did you start late and you’re ending early, but there were even some closure days early on during the season. What has this meant for all the people that you employ?
Pack: It’s hard on them and it’s exactly one of the reasons why we wanted to announce early on so people could prepare for that and get their lives set up for that next thing because we feel that burden. We love our team members and we provided a bunch of hours early on to try to keep everybody going, but we think about them in all of our decisions. But yeah, it’s been hard on them. They haven’t been getting the hours they normally get. Our instructors, the patrol, typically we need the same amount of ski patrollers every day because of the amount of work that needs to happen on the day. Not as many lift operators due to the number of lifts we’re running every day due to the snowpack. So yeah, it’s hard on them and we do feel for them.
Miller: I know that this is just one year and you said that this happens every 10 years or so, but the future we’re talking about is different than the past that we have experienced. The Climate Change Research Institute at OSU found last year that the state’s annual average temperature increased by 2.2 °F over the last century and is likely to be as much as 5 degrees warmer in the next 50 years. And then more specifically in terms of skiing and what we’re talking about here, snowfall is projected to decrease by as much as 50% by the end of this century. Those are statewide numbers. How much do you think about the future of snowpack on Mount Hood?
Pack: We think about it all the time. It’s our lifeblood. We’re fortunate that our main base area is at about 5,300 ft, so we’re higher than some of the other resorts. We also have Cooper Spur, and unfortunately that did not get open this year because it’s at a much lower elevation, in fact, lower than Hood River Meadows, our other base area. But we think about it. But we’ll have skiing up high and Mount Hood typically delivers a fair amount of snowfall. So in the near future, we know we’re good. Long term, that’s stuff we can’t control, but we’ll adjust our season and what we can do on our own accordingly.
Miller: At what point does a ski resort become unsustainable? I guess I mean at what point are there too few operable days that you just can’t get enough revenue to pay for the tons of people that we were talking about earlier that make it possible and safe to operate on a mountain?
Pack: I don’t know that there’s a number of days, especially in Oregon. I’ve been part of other large ski companies that did it in a 90 day season, and they did 350,000 skier visits in that, and they did day and night skiing and just made it happen. So if people want to ski and ride, which people are really passionate about it, they’re going to find a way to make it happen, and it’s one of the nice things we have up here is we have night skiing five nights a week. So people can work the regular day jobs and still come up here. We’ll still have that. So I think those number of days would just be condensed in that scenario, but I think we’re a ways off.
Miller: I want to turn to other ways to get by. Is snowmaking, which has, in my mind, never been a huge part of Oregon ski operations that I’ve seen, unlike other places in the Northeast, how much could that help you in the years to come?
Pack: I wish it could. But if you look at this year, Dave, we were getting a ton of moisture early on. In fact, there was flooding and flooding out roads. If you remember that time up in Washington where roads are flooded out, even Highway 35 got flooded out and closed for a number of days.
Miller: Right, the problem, it was temperature, in other words, not precipitation.
Pack: Yeah, so we don’t have the early season snowmaking temps, the wet bulb temps you need to make good quality snow. We do have snowmaking, but it just doesn’t deliver on Mount Hood. By the time it gets cold enough, we have plenty of snow.
Miller: Then there are other ways that places operate in the winter and ideally in the spring as ski mountains get by. How much are you thinking about boosting offseason revenue, whether that means events or weddings or conventions or tours or Skibowl, which has an alpine slide, all different ways to make money in the summer or early fall. How are you thinking about those kinds of revenue boosts right now?
Pack: That’s a big focus of ours and what we’ve been working on the last few years. We don’t want to be a Disneyland-type scenario. It’s not who we are. We have some incredible wetlands and beautiful wildflowers out here. We’ve built nine miles of hiking trails to be able to get people up here. That’s working. We’re doing a number of weddings, and people are just finding the wedding venue spectacular and incredible backdrops. So we’re doing more weddings and events in the summer. And we have food and beverage so people can come and hike, and the great thing is a lot of the other snow parks or trailheads are extremely crowded. We have these huge parking lots that we have for the winter, so we have great access to the mountain for people to come up. So we’ll continue to build on that. We’ll look for some bigger amenity type stuff. We’re working on that now and hopefully within the next few years we’ll have something.
Miller: What are you thinking about? Can you give us a sense?
Pack: Well, it’s still up in the air and we have to work with the Forest Service on that. But we’ve looked at some high ropes course type activity, some maybe summer type skiing, those kinds of things on, on artificial grass. There’s some great ways to do that. And maybe even some via ferrata type stuff, but all stuff way too early to make a decision. We’ve, we’re outlining some of the stuff with the Forest Service. And of course, anytime you make a decision on something like that, it has to go through the NEPA process with the Forest Service, and we go through all that at that time. These are all conceptual type things.
Miller: Are you a skier yourself?
Pack: I’m a skier, snowboarder, telemarketer, Nordic skier. I love winter. That’s why I’m in this business.
Miller: I assume, but I don’t want to always make assumptions without verifying. I’m just curious what it’s been like for you this year on those rare days when everything came together and you could enjoy the sport that you love, that feeling of, I don’t know, flying or floating in a controlled way down a mountain. What’s it been like?
Pack: I haven’t gotten the same amount of days I got in last year. I’ll tell you that, I’ll be honest. But the days I’ve had out there, like just talking with the guests on the chair, everybody’s just been so thankful and really just appreciating what we have because you can see what it’s taken to put it together. And I feel the same way. I feel the same gratitude to our team and just thankful that we’re skiing and riding because there are resorts that never got open this year.
Miller: When you go up, just briefly, when you go up in a chairlift, do you tell people who you are or are you more like a secret CEO?
Pack: I’m secret. I mean, I’m wearing a uniform. I don’t hide that, but if they ask if I work here, I say yes and they say, what do you do? I say, well, I drive a bus. I drive a snowcat. I say, I’ll do whatever it takes, and they usually get it out of me by the end of the ride because I’m answering a lot of questions pretty broadly.
Miller: Greg Pack, thanks for your time and here’s to a better next season.
Pack: All right, thank you, Dave.
Miller: Greg Pack is president and general manager of Mount Hood Meadows.
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