The storm on Monday and Tuesday left us some snow – 5-6″ initially, which compacted and blew down to about 2″ when the temperatures went above freezing and the wind picked up on Tuesday. The good news is there’s more snow in the forecast this week and weekend. We still need a sizeable amount of snow to provide enough coverage to open for skiing & riding.
It’s been a few years since we’ve missed our target opening date by this much. Looking back at the past few years, here’s our opening dates:
- 2018: December 22
- 2019: December 21
- 2020: December 12
- 2021: November 20
- 2022: December 17
- 2023: December 16
That’s a great run, especially 2021 where we opened in November! The previous time we opened in November was back in 2004, when we opened on November 7th. Our earliest opening on record was way back in 1964 (just a couple years after the T-bar was built!) when we opened on October 17th.
If you’ve been in Anchorage for a while, you probably remember the run of poor snow years we had about 10 years ago. In 2012, 2013, 2014, 2016, and 2017 we opened in mid-late January due to lack of snowfall. So while this year’s snowfall has so far been disappointing, it’s far from unprecedented. As they say in the investing world, past results are not indicative of future returns, so we’ll hope a slow start to the season is followed up by lots of snow later this year! As always, we’ll push the season as far as we can, and hope to match our record of staying open into the first weekend in May as we have since spring 2021.
