Gift of more snow may not arrive until holidays

Scant snowfall has put a chill on early-season skiing. Snowpack statewide is just 58 percent of normal and even worse than the abysmal start to last season.

Take a beat and calm yourselves. There’s still plenty of winter to come.

Meteorologists say the snow season is not a wash — at least, not yet. If Colorado is as dry in February as it is now, then it’s cause for concern, but it’s still early.

“We’re not that far below normal for snowpack yet,” National Weather Service meteorologist Paul Schlatter said. “When it’s early in the season like this we can still be optimistic, just because there’s so much more snow to fall.”

According to Snotel data as of Tuesday, snowpack statewide is about 58 percent of normal and about 92 percent of last year.

Still, conditions at Colorado ski areas are sketchy. Record-high temperatures caused early-season snow to melt and kept snowmaking guns idle in November. Opening dates have been pushed back. In Aspen, where only 143 of 675 acres are open for skiing on Aspen Mountain and 59 of 3,388 acres are open at Snowmass, Aspen Skiing Co. has started feeding idle workers three days a week.

The situation is so grim at Steamboat — only 30 acres of 2,965 acres are open — that the owners of Steamboat Ski Touring Center launched a tongue-in-cheek contest, urging people to create and film their own dances to the “snow gods.”

“I am so convinced that the snow gods somewhere will see us dancing and give us snow,” said Kajsa Lindgren, who owns the nordic ski center. “It’s just a matter of when they’re going to let it go.”

OpenSnow.com meterologist Joel Gratz said it may be Dec. 20 — or later — before the snow really starts to fly in the mountains. (Light snow is in the National Weather Service forecast for the mountains, and as much as an inch of snow could fall on the Front Range south of Denver on Thursday.)

The snowpack was paltry early in the season last year, too, not hitting normal until the middle of December, according to Snotel data. Gratz said if the dry spell happened after a few big dumps of snow this year, it wouldn’t be as noticeable — or as annoying.

“It’s not unusual to see a pattern set up like this but it’s an unfortunate timing,” he said. “It just happens to be happening when there’s not a whole lot of snow in the mountains.

“From ski and snowboard standpoint it feels like the end of the world,” Gratz said. “From a weather standpoint, I’m not freaking out yet. We’re just a couple big storms away from having average snowpack.”