Utah ski industry hoping to follow up on record-breaking 2015-16

A snowstorm before Thanksgiving got the 2016-17 ski season off to a nice start for Utah’s ski resorts, but even if the season began slowly, Nathan Rafferty knew conditions could be fleeting. “Some of our snowiest years have had below-normal Novembers,” Rafferty, president and chief executive officer of Ski Utah, said during a 2016-17 season kickoff event. “I’m sure most of you were around for the Olympic year, 2001, when I left to go away with family on Thanksgiving and came back to 100 inches in 100 hours. So things can change very, very quickly here.”

A snowstorm before Thanksgiving got the 2016-17 ski season off to a nice start for Utah’s ski resorts, but even if the season began slowly, Nathan Rafferty knew conditions could be fleeting.

“Some of our snowiest years have had below-normal Novembers,” Rafferty, president and chief executive officer of Ski Utah, said during a 2016-17 season kickoff event. “I’m sure most of you were around for the Olympic year, 2001, when I left to go away with family on Thanksgiving and came back to 100 inches in 100 hours. So things can change very, very quickly here.”

One change Rafferty does not want to see is a shift in momentum. Utah’s ski industry is coming off its best season ever, with 4.5 million skier days and nearly half of the ski resorts having all-time records. The overall skier-days figure was up 13 percent over the prior year and 5 percent above the prior record set in 2007-08.

Rafferty attributed the increase to several factors. One was nearly $100 million in infrastructure improvements, primarily at Park City and Snowbird.

“That really shines a spotlight on Utah and gives us here in the office a lot of fuel, a lot of great things to talk about,” he said. “We had early-season snow — early-season meaning before Christmas — so when we came through that Christmas holiday, everybody was awfully happy with the snow conditions then.”

The industry fared well for resorts west of the Mississippi River. For those east of it, “they had a really tough ski season,” he said.

“If you lived in New York or Boston, which are two of our biggest markets, you really had to get on a plane to come skiing, and so Colorado and Utah, both who set records last year, were the benefit of that,” Rafferty said.

The Utah ski industry also benefits from tourism advertising campaigns from the Utah Office of Tourism.

“The takeaway from all of this is we have a ton of momentum,” Rafferty said. “People who came here last year absolutely had a great time. We know they’re going to be back.”

Among changes in store for the 2016-17 season are a pair of new lifts at Powder Mountain that added more than 1,000 lift-serviced acres. “This is like bolting on another ski area to your existing ski area. This is the largest single-season resort expansion in U.S. ski industry history,” he said.

Whisper Ridge is offering 60,000 acres of private riding and skiing terrain via eight snowcats and with helicopter service. “[It’s] a very unique and fun new twist on skiing that I think will complement all the great resort skiing we have,” Rafferty said.

Also new this season is a Ski Utah LED sign on Foothill Drive and Parleys Way near the mouth of Parleys Canyon. Mimicking the downtown Walker Center sign that changes color based on weather forecasts, the snowflake in the Ski Utah sign has a white default but will turn green if any of Utah’s resorts have more than 12 inches of snow overnight, or red if there is an 80 percent chance of at least 8 inches of snow in the next 24 hours.