Does another warm El Niño winter mean another snowless season at the ski resorts?

If you are a skier or a snowboarder, I’m sure I don’t have to remind you that this past winter was a sad one. You weren’t out on the slopes shreddin’ the sick gnar like you’d like to be.

Well, unfortunately I’m here to tell you that forecasters are reporting that we can expect another El Niño winter season.

“We are going to be looking for about a 90 percent chance that that’s going to last through the winter next year,” KING 5 meteorologist Rich Marriott said. “In fact, an 80 percent chance that’s going to last through the spring.”

In case you’ve forgotten what El Niño means:

“Normally during an El Niño winter we’ll end up, over the course of the winter, having above normal temperatures,” Marriott said.

But before you decide to sell your skis to Coloradans on Craigslist, Stevens Pass VP of marketing Chris Danforth is optimistic.

“I think there’s this tendency to have a gloom and doom attitude when you hear the word El Niño,” he said. “The data here at Stevens, and the snow totals that we’ve seen, they don’t suggest that we should be totally pessimistic about that.

“We went back and looked at the last six El Niños and two of them were below average snowfall, two of them were average snow fall and two of them were above average snowfall. So we looked even further and said, OK, well they’re saying this could be a strong El Niño. So we looked back to the last time we had a strong El Niño, which was the ’98/’99 season. We had 466 inches of snow that year and our average is 460, so pretty much an average year for us. There’s a thirty-three percent chance we’re going to have a below average year, based on the historical data. It’s hard to get too worked up about that.”

Last year was tough for Stevens Pass. The resort opened the season late, closed early, and had to shut down a few days in between because of rain. But Danforth said it wasn’t as bleak as people thought it was.

“Certainly perception by the customer was: there’s no snow up in the mountains,” he said. “Even when we did have good snow, there was just the perception that there wasn’t. Other resorts at a little bit lower in elevation than us weren’t open. That certainly hurt us, just the attention they would get. Folks thought that was the scene across the entire Cascade crest.

“It was a difficult winter. We saw our visits were off about 50 percent. We were like, ‘Just look at our webcam. You can take a look for yourself and see that we do have snow and the coverage is decent.'”

Now the resort is trying to make back some of that lost cash by taking advantage of our clear, hot summer weather.

“We’re now in our forth year of our mountain bike park. I guess this is the silver lining of the poor winter: we were able to open up the bike park a month early. Because of that, our bike park visits are way up. It’s still a very small part of our business but we’re seeing good growth. It allows our core employees to have more year-round type employment.”

They also do summer chair lift rides. Crystal Mountain does gondola rides and this weekend the Summit at Snoqualmie is hosting a music festival called Chinook Fest Summit, featuring Allen Stone.