"WHITEFISH, Mont. A chairlift cranks into gear as a group of ski patrollers at Whitefish Mountain Resort gets the mountain ready for another season. This is a typical safety training. They'll practice how to evacuate people off chairs if there were an emergency. But not much here feels typical. For starters, no one is in boots or on skis. Despite the training happening in late November, there is no snow at the base lodge, and the slopes leading up the mountain are brown,"
""Yeah, if we don't have snow, that's going to dictate how our season goes," says resort spokesman Chad Sokol. Going into the Thanksgiving holiday the traditional start to the ski season resorts across the West delayed openings due to low or no snowfall, and many couldn't even make artificial snow due to the balmy weather. It's not clear how much of an effect this has had on winter bookings."
"The Whitefish Mountain Resort, long known locally as Big Mountain, sits about 60 miles south of the U.S.-Canada border and has historically gotten a quarter of its business from up north. "We think of Canadians as our neighbors, and British Columbia and Alberta, we're right here we're a border state," says Zak Anderson, executive director of Explore Whitefish, the local resort chamber."
Ski patrollers at Whitefish Mountain Resort ran chairlift evacuation training in late November despite no snow at the base lodge and brown slopes. Resorts across the Western U.S. delayed openings around the traditional Thanksgiving start because of low or no snowfall and unusually warm weather that limited snowmaking. Recent storms began to bring snow to the Rockies and Pacific Northwest, but uncertainty about bookings remains. Tariffs and negative rhetoric from President Trump have contributed to a roughly 25% drop in Canadian visitors to Montana, a key market for local ski economies, prompting local frustration.
Read at www.npr.org
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