Turner's season of misfortune ends
The board of Kootenai Winter Sports Inc. decided Monday to pull the plug on the ski season and close Turner Mountain until next year. The mountain has not opened to skiers since Jan. 31, due to weather conditions.
“Mother Nature won this round, but there’s always next year,” Kootenai Winter Sports board president Bruce Zwang said of the closure.
This was a tough season for Turner Mountain, which began weeks before the mountain opened. A fire tore through the groomer shed Dec. 4, completely engulfing the shed and destroying irreplaceable parts and equipment.
Ski enthusiast and volunteer Scott Kirschenmann was credited with saving the season at that point. Kirschenmann realized the danger and reacted quickly enough to save the two expensive and vital groomers from the blaze.
At that point, Mother Nature joined the battle. Although temperatures in early December were conducive, moisture levels were not, and the mountain did not receive adequate snowfall for opening until Dec. 29, a week behind their normal opening time.
Zwang said the weather conditions of the early part of the year created even more problems for Turner. As temperatures warmed during the day, typical freezing did not occur at night. As that warming trend continued, the mountain’s snowpack gradually dwindled.
The depleted base was decimated by the wet weather of late January and early February. “The base just wasn’t strong enough, after the warm temperatures, to survive the wet weather,” he said.
The decision to close the mountain means skiers were only able to enjoy 18 days at Turner Mountain this year. A normal season, Zwang said, has 54 days of skiing.
The shortened season creates a financial burden for the ski area, as some of their larger operating costs, such as insurance premiums, are fixed annual expenses. They pay the same rate for 18 days of skiing as they pay for 300 days, Zwang said.
Other expenses, such as the fees paid to the United States Forest Service to lease and use the land, are based upon receipts. So, while Turner Mountain loses the possible revenue from those days of skiing, they also lose a bit of the expense of being open.
“We get years like this every once in a while, but we get through them and we’ll get through this,” Zwang said.
A similar weather situation happened in 2005, recalls board member Jon Jeresek. “We were able to ski for only four days in 2005,” he said.
Jeresek, who is employed by the United States Forest Service, said he has spoken with one of the service’s hydrologists who firmly believes in the five-year weather cycle.
“If you look at the hydrographs from 2005 and 2015, they’re virtually identical. There was a dry spell that lasted until the end of March or early April, and then a big storm hit. I’ll bet we’re going to see that again this year,” Jeresek said.
He was disappointed with the need to close the mountain for the year, but said it had to be done. People are taking advantage of the warmer weather and have moved on to other activities.
“Even with a change in the weather and a good snow storm, it would be tough to attract enough people back to the mountain to make it financially viable to reopen,” he said.
Turner Mountain is more susceptible to weather fluctuations than many larger ski areas in other parts of Montana and the nation because they rely entirely upon natural snow, they have neither the equipment nor the infrastructure to make snow for skiing.
“The infrastructure needs would be hugely economically prohibitive for us. We could not bear the financial side of making snow,” Jeresek said.
Both Zwang and Jeresek stressed the end of the season as just that, the end of a season. “This sort of thing makes us tough,” Zwang said. “But we’ll hunker down and ride it out and we’ll be back next year.”