When you’ve been skiing Cannon Mountain since 1962 and have shown up for more opening days than you can count, it’s hard to be surprised. On Friday, Fred Branscombe was surprised.
“They have a lot of snow down. There’s more than last January and February, ” said Branscombe of Manchester, as he took a meal break at 10 a.m. after having already completed eight runs with a half-dozen friends on opening day of the state-owned ski area.
Skiing buddy Joe Brodeur of Hooksett – a relative Cannon newbie, since he has skied there only since 1979 – agreed. “They’ve never had three (runs) open on the front on the first day,” he said.
You can thank upgrades to snowmaking equipment, including a new pumphouse to draw water from Echo Lake and 388 tower snowmaking guns, part of a $5 million project to cut energy use and help protect the ski area from whims of the weather.
Last winter those whims were far from whimsical, as a shortage of natural snow and record-high temperatures cut the number of skier and snowboarder visits throughout the Northeast by roughly one-third, clobbering their bottom line. Typical was Missouri-based Peak Resorts, which owns Attitash, Crotched and Wildcat ski areas in New Hampshire, reported an 8.7 percent decline in revenue last year even though it has just bought a new ski area in New York to add to that income.
The hope of ski area owners, not to mention millions of snow sport enthusiasts, is that 2016-17 will be different. So far it certainly looks different, with snow filling the evergreen trees far south of Plymouth. Temperatures have been cold enough for enough snow-making that as of Friday there were four ski areas open in New Hampshire –Bretton Woods, Loon and Wildcat as well as Cannon – with many more opening this coming week.
But things aren’t perfect, as Friday’s cold rain reminded the hundreds of people who drove into Franconia Notch to ski the eight runs open at Cannon Mountain.
As is usually the case at ski area opening days, most people at Cannon on Friday held season passes, looking to maximize their investment or reconnect with friends.
“You see people you haven’t seen since last spring,” said Tammy Skaliotis, a self-described intermediate skier whose college-aged son skied at Cannon, and who on Friday was accompanying her 14-year-old daughter, a member of the Franconia Ski Club, whose members filled the slopes.
Bill Santis of Hopkinton has been coming to Cannon for 40 years and the day-after-Thanksgiving visit is something of a tradition.
“There are a lot of season-pass people here,” he said.
But it wasn’t just regulars who had made the trek.
Mike Moran, 16, of Webster, Mass., and Ryan Vigeant, 15, of Dudley, Mass., were driven up by Moran’s parents to try some early season snowboarding.
“We figured it would be fine,” said Moran, as he stood patiently in the drizzle for an interview. He’s a seasoned Cannon skier but this was Vigeant’s exposure to Cannon’s infamously erratic weather.
“It’s definitely bigger than the mountain I’m used to,” said Vigeant, who lives near Wachusett Ski Area in Princeton, Mass.
The long-term prospect for opening days is not as certain as New Hampshire would like, since snow sports pump more than $1 billion in direct and indirect sales into the state each year, according to a Plymouth State University study.
Yet another study, from University of Ottawa professors, indicated that rising temperatures and more erratic precipitation could make ski areas south of the White Mountains – including Crotched and Pats Peak – financially unsustainable within two decades.
For the time being, however, there’s skiing to be done. Season pass sales at Cannon are up strongly this year, sid Greg Keeler, director of sales and marketing. That was fueled by last spring’s price cuts, made to keep people from getting too discouraged by the weather, but the increase in sales more than made up for the decrease in per-ticket income to Cannon.
“We are ahead of last year in revenue,” he said.
(David Brooks can be reached at 369-3313 or dbrooks@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @GraniteGeek.)
