don’t contract with a consulting meteo- rologist, NOAA and the National Weath- er Service (NWS) is your next best option. She suggests developing a relationship with the forecasters at your local NWS office. At the very least, weather.gov allows you to point and click on the area map and the forecast accounts for eleva- tion, “which is more than I can say for most other resources,” she says. In addition, says Smith, NWS “local area forecast discussions” offer insights into local weather patterns and provide additional context. Changes at NWS could have dra- matic impacts on how accurately weath- er is forecast, though. As of late July, more than 3,000 NWS positions were vacant, with over half of those vacancies the result of layoffs and early retirement offers from earlier this year. Unless key positions at NOAA and NWS are filled by winter, complicated winter forecasts may be more difficult to dial-in as fewer weather balloons go up and forecast products aren’t maintained due to lack of manpower. Institutional knowledge. We must work with the recourses we have, though, which includes your acute understanding of your ski area’s micro- climate. As Brooke says, “Microclimates are, essentially, why I have a job. Every mountain has its own.” Air movement over and around a mountain results in unique condi- tions relative to the surrounding area. “Depending on what side of the moun- tain you’re on, you can have vastly dif- ferent weather and have vastly different effects on operations, especially depend- ing on your lift orientation and what kind of chair you have,” says Brooke. OpenSnow’s forecasts do factor in terrain and elevation and are utilizing AI to help further refine forecasts in the future based on highly-localized terrain features, but both Smith and Brooke agree that those with their boots on the ground know their microclimate best. “Ski area operators who are out in the field daily can often pick up on microscale factors that a weather model or forecaster might not always see from behind the computer screen, such as which areas tend to see more snow and wind than others,” says Smith.
TOP: Rubble from blasting the upper terminal site for Sunday River’s eight-place chairlift, which lowered the grade of the terminal about 15 feet to help with wind resistance. BOTTOM: The entire upper terminal site was regraded, which also helped ease access to adjacent trails.
In other words, it takes experience to understand the unique ways in which wind and weather affect each aerial lift at your mountain, and those with expe- rience can look at a forecast from a reli- able source and reasonably predict how the weather will affect operations on any given day. This invaluable institutional knowl- edge should be broadly shared internally. UNDER PRESSURE Wind holds can ruin the day for guests and hurt the bottom line for ski areas, so operations teams do everything they can to keep lifts spinning safely. The decision to not run a lift most often requires eval- uation and communication across multi- ple departments. “It requires a high level of trust between lift ops and lift maintenance and ski patrol—we’re all on the same team and nobody’s out there pressuring anyone,” says Laurel Blessley, lift main-
tenance director at Big Sky Resort, Mont. “We all want to keep each other safe and the public safe, so having that trust is really, really important.” No quit. The pressure to run lifts, especially on busy days, is real, says Aaron Kellett, general manager of White- face, N.Y., which stands more than 3,100 vertical feet above the valley and where strong winds are a part of life. On slower days when the wind is forecast to be strong throughout, Kellett says they’ll make the call by, say, 1:30 p.m. to keep affected lifts closed for the rest of the day. “On a busy day, we might fight that out,” he says. If a lift can open by 3 p.m., they’ll do it. However, “It doesn’t do anybody any good to push the limits on a busy day,” he says. Sunday River, Maine, general manag- er Brian Heon says if the forecast is look- ing spicy, his team will decide which lifts to prioritize getting open in the morning
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