Fayetteville, NY (NCC News)- Central New York has seen a mild winter this season. This past January was the 12th warmest January on record and central New York is also seeing less snow. The total snowfall amount in Syracuse right now is around 48 inches. That’s about 30 inches less than normal. Ski resorts and businesses that rely on the snow are struggling. However, Bill Hane, the operations manager at Four Seasons Ski and Golf Center says there are things he can do to combat the warm weather.
“We do make snow and we’ve had enough cold weather so we were able to make snow early in the season and that pretty much has last us and gotten us through some of the warm spells we’ve had this season,” said Hane.
Although temperatures are starting to drop enough for businesses to artificially make snow, another big problem ski resorts face is rain. Taylor Nolan, is on the ski team at Syracuse University. She says conditions were not good in the beginning of the season, but are getting better now.
“”They started off not that great it was not a lot of snow at the beginning of the year, but they’ve been a lot better because its been colder and we’ve been getting a lot of snow. Anytime it gets above freezing temperatures [conditions] are not good,” said Nolan.
President’s day weekend gave ski resorts a needed boost. With children off from school the resorts were able to stay open and make up for some lost days. Hane says when the weather is right, the resort is busy and that he will probably do “fairly average” for the year.
“You know we’ll have lines going out the door and you know people just want to get out and enjoy themselves so were running around trying to take everybody getting tubes out of our cages and stuff,” said Hane.
The four inches of snow Central New York saw today will also help.
“That will help people ‘they’ll go oh there’s nice fresh snow outside,” said Hane.
