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New Mexico's dry winter left more than the mountains bare.
It's the opening day of the Winter Olympics in Turin and the world is watching. Millions gape at the soaring Italian vistas and cheer as biathletes swoosh across Cesana San Sicario, skiers jostle through moguls at Sauze d'Oulx Jouvenceaux and figure skaters triple-Salchow their way around the rink at Palavela.
Thousands of miles away, the silence at Ski Santa Fe is deafening. The mostly empty Super Chief Quad-one of only three chair lifts in operation-shuttles quietly up the mountain, the only sounds created by the wind whispering through the trees above and the occasional scrape of ski edges carving a path in the man-made snow below.
Ski Santa Fe has dubbed this winter "The Year of the Groomer," which is a polite way of saying "The Year Nature Screwed Us Over." Employees have worked around the clock for months just to keep a meager 10 trails (out of 67) functional. Nature owns the rest. The
upper mountain is balder than Ving Rhames and one errant turn on the lower slopes will send you careening into a patch of rocky brown earth.
The handful of wobbly beginners and
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diehards trying to squeeze every last ounce out of their season passes are enjoying themselves. But so are the families who've driven up the mountain just to sit on the grassy slopes outside the lodge, eat sandwiches and soak in the sun.
Picnics aside, this season's anemic snowfall has landed on the New Mexico winter recreation industry like a ton of bricks. Mother Nature's parched-earth policy has precipitated deep financial wounds that will likely take years to heal. In fact, the reverberations are already shuddering through the New Mexico economy and ecology.
"This season has been very difficult on everybody," says Steve Lewis, spokesman for Ski New Mexico, a trade organization. "In the institutional memory of the area [ski] operators, nobody can quite remember it ever being this dry."
As of March 6, Ski Santa Fe had a 16-inch snow base. When the ski area closed in April last season, the snow base
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sat at more
than 130 inches. Ski Santa Fe also has operated for most of this ski season with less than 20 percent of its terrain in operation and with less than 15 percent of its available trails open.
The calendar says March but it's been May in Santa Fe since November. According to Ed Polasko, a hydrologist with the National
Weather Service in Albuquerque, New Mexico is on track for its second driest winter in more than 110 years.
That's two ones and a zero.
Which also happens to be roughly the amount, in millions of dollars, that New Mexico stands to lose as a result. According to Lewis, the state ski industry produced $325 million in economic impact on the New Mexico economy during last winter's banner season. Lewis says the state will reap at least $100 million less this year, thanks to the winter that never was.
That's a one and eight zeros.
The entire industry has been affected but nobody has taken a bigger sucker-punch than the Abruzzo family, which, among other ventures, operates both the Ski Santa Fe and Sandia Peak ski areas. Both locations are enduring heavy losses, but when Ski
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Santa Fe opened its gates in December it also unveiled its sparkling new Millennium Triple Chair lift, a project that took years of contentious negotiations, litigation and scrutiny along with millions of dollars to complete. To date, the lift hasn't carried a single skier up the mountain.
Blame it on global warming. Blame it on the desert climate. Blame it on good old-fashioned bad luck. But the truth is, the ski industry has always been a feast or famine enterprise. And everyone is starving this season.
A year ago, the Sangre de Cristos were saturated with nearly
double their average snowfall. These days areas like Ski Santa Fe can't buy enough snow. Not that they haven't tried.
"A lot of ski areas in New Mexico wouldn't be open without snow-making," says Richard Abruzzo, senior vice president of Ski Santa Fe. "Maybe some would be
scratching by on a little bit of natural snowfall but obviously that's going to be a huge difference-maker in a year like this."
In a year like this, Ski Santa Fe's lone saving grace has been its cadre of snow makers and slope groomers, whose diligence has coaxed small but significant patches of the ski area's own personal hell to freeze over. Taos Ski Valley seems to be faring better than the rest of the regional ski areas thanks to its snow-making capabilities, but most-like Angel Fire, Red River and Ski Apache-are in the same leaky boat as Ski Santa Fe. Then there is the Pajarito Mountain Ski Area outside Los Alamos, which has no snow-making machines and has yet to see a single skier this season.
"This year has just been devastating," says Pajarito General
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Manager Tom Long. "We've had other poor years where we haven't operated a lot, but we're drawing a goose egg right now. We haven't turned the lift once. We haven't had anybody at all. It's been very challenging, very depressing."
According to Long, Pajarito has received all of 12 inches of snow since October. Not enough to build a snowman, let alone turn a profit. And while Pajarito is losing thousands of dollars every day, the meter is still running on the ski area's taxes and utility, maintenance and insurance bills.
"All of the big items that are involved in an operation of this size still continue whether you're open or not," Long says. "Basically you do anything you can to mitigate the cost."
Long says he currently is employing about eight people at Pajarito, down from more than 100 at the same time last year. Likewise, Ski Santa Fe-which Candy DeJoia, Ski Santa Fe group sales and skier services manager, says can employee as many as 500 people in a good year-is functioning with a fraction of its normal staff.
"We can't change the weather," Richard Abruzzo says. "What we can change is decisions based on the trends you see. As a result, we've never ramped up this winter to the kind of staff that we would have during the big years."
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Ski Santa Fe Patrol Director Cody Sheppard knows this as well as anybody. The manpower on his ski patrol is significantly diminished. Not that there is much to patrol. But, as a veteran of Ski Santa Fe for nearly 30 years, Sheppard says dismal winters like this one are merely part and parcel of working in the industry.
"Most of us who've been in this business a long time take a more long-term view," Sheppard says. "If you keep a long-term view, you are prepared to absorb these sort of years. Otherwise, one year you'd be thinking it's wonderful and the next year you'd be ready to shoot yourself."
If anybody were inclined to dig up a gun, it'd be the Abruzzo brothers. Richard, Benny and Louis had hoped the new Millennium Triple Chair at Ski Santa Fe would be ferrying skiers up to the aptly named Deception Peak this winter and helping to bolster the ski area's slowly dwindling customer base in the process. For now, the 12,075-foot crest is a
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mirage of what could have been this year, if not a sober reminder about the dangers of playing high-stakes roulette with Old Man Winter.
The ill-fated spin of the wheel couldn't have come at a worst time either. According to Polasko, record snowfall in the Sangre de Cristos has basically gone "from first to worst" in subsequent years. But that's not the only source of frustration for ski area operators like the Abruzzos.
The Millennium Triple Chair is a project that stretches far back into the last millennium. Ski Santa Fe spent thousands, if not millions, on impact studies, assessments and litigation in the midst of nearly 20 years of heated debate and legal wrangling over the new lift.
In 2001, Ski Santa Fe sued Santa Fe County after the county commission attempted to block the project amid an uproar of protests primarily from the environmental and Native American communities. A March 2005 court ruling handed down in favor of Ski Santa Fe finally cleared the way and the company broke ground on the lift project in April.
Not long after construction began, Tesuque Pueblo filed a lawsuit to halt the project under the assertion that the new lift would grant marauding skiers access to sacred pueblo sites. Construction on the $3 million lift nevertheless continued until its completion last December.
According to comments made by Ski Santa Fe President Benny Abruzzo in a November 2005 New Mexico Business Weekly article, the new lift is expected to help reverse a trend that has seen the annual number of skiers drawn to Ski Santa Fe shrink from a peak of 260,000 a season in the early '90s to about 169,000 last year.
Richard Abruzzo says it's premature to handicap figures for the current season but DeJoia says the ski area is averaging about 500 clients a day. That means Ski Santa Fe will draw just 57,000 customers this season even if it manages to eke its way to the scheduled April 2 closing date. Even divine intervention-in the form of a heavy snowfall before Spring Break-will leave the ski area far short of its 186,000-a-year average.
"When you're dependent on the weather you can't get too wrapped up in what it's going to do next," Richard Abruzzo says. "You just enjoy it when it's great and try to get through it when it's not."
It's not. And the combination of abysmal sales and a costly new pet is undoubtedly causing Ski Santa Fe and Sandia Peak Ski to hemorrhage cash out their Abruzzos. Definitive figures won't be known (or divulged) for some time but a conservative estimate is that Ski Santa Fe will lose more than $5 million this season on ticket sales alone.
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Add lost revenue-in the form of rentals, food, beverage and retail-along with losses at Sandia Peak and the two Abruzzo operations will likely combine for a loss of more than $10 million this year compared to the average season.
That stings. And that's before factoring in the impact of the Millennium sitting dormant all winter. But despite the hard times, the Ski Santa Fe stakeholders have an enviable knack for putting a shiny gloss of paint on a somber situation.
"That was a decision for the future of the Santa Fe ski area," Richard Abruzzo says of the Millennium lift. "The good news is that it will still be there next year and, with a normal snowfall, it will be open. Plus it'll have one less year of wear and tear on it."
Apparently the Wintermill Sports Shop at Ski Santa Fe is having a sale on rose-colored goggles. Others in the regional ski industry have a more practical take on the circumstances.
"In the short term, that really has to pinch," Long says. "Ski Santa Fe built a brand-new chair lift and it's just sitting there. Lifts are pretty expensive and then to not generate any revenue from something like that
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has got to be tough to take. That's not going to make you feel good."
"It is a letdown for us," DeJoia admits. "We were looking forward to having the new lift up and running, but Mother Nature just hasn't helped us out."
All ski area operators know their livelihood is contingent on the whims of nature. The key to survival, Richard Abruzzo says, is having a business foundation impervious to destruction during a prolonged dry spell.
"It's paramount to have a financial makeup and plan to be able to ride out the difficult years," Abruzzo says. "There's going to be tough seasons wherever you are located geographically. When it's snowing down here, it's typically not snowing somewhere else. Somebody is always getting left out. This year it's us."
This year, the log cabin is all but deserted. The building, located a
few miles south of Ski Santa Fe off of Hyde Park Road, temporarily houses Cottam's Ski Shop. The inside looks a little like the Overlook Hotel just before Jack Nicholson goes two shades south of insane in
The Shining
. No work and little play makes Matthew and Mathew dull boys.
Matthew Field, 27, and Mathew Hall, 28,
sport the tattered hoodies and rugged beard stubble of ski bums as they loiter near the cash register, trying to find creative ways to earn their paychecks without going Redrum waiting for a customer, any customer, to appear.
In the meantime, the pair has taken the opportunity to write answers to frequently asked questions on a dry-erase board behind the counter. "Ski area is 7 miles further up the road," the board reads, "toilets outside on the right" and "Yes, we are Kiwis…"
This isn't exactly what they had in mind when the native New Zealanders answered an Internet advertisement looking for employees
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to man Cottam's during the expected frenetic ski season. Both were living in London when they decided to seek their fame and fortune (or at least a couple months of snowboarding) in New Mexico.
"I was expecting a little party town with a lot of snow," Field says. "It's basically been the complete opposite. I didn't really check out the rest of the States [for jobs] before I came. I kind of wish
I had now."
Instead,
Field and Hall are
left to tinker on ski and snowboard repairs and accommodate
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the handful of customers who
trickle through the door. Right now, the only sound inside the ski shop is Prince singing from a radio perched on a workbench in the back of the store.
This is what it sounds like when doves cry.
"It's been
disappointing to say the least,"
Hall says. "We were told at the beginning of the season that
we'd really be busy, that we'd have thousands of customers coming through,
but that hasn't been actuated."
Hall and Field take their
victories where they can, getting in runs at
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Ski Santa Fe, Angel Fire and Wolf Creek in Colorado. And there are other silver linings to be found in the cloudless skies of Northern New Mexico.
"This is a good winter for me despite the lack of snow," Hall says. "It's nice waking up to sunshine every day. At least it's better
than waking up to the dirt and grime of London. Now that's a miserable fucking place in the winter. This is pretty nice by comparison."
That said, neither Hall nor Field expects to be back in New Mexico next season. If anything, they'll head to Canada where they can get the most mileage out of their work visas or somewhere in the States where a healthy amount of snow is all but assured.
"To be honest, I don't think that Santa Fe would draw me back," Field says. "I'd probably look towards Colorado if I did this again."
Lorie Andrew, the 52-year-old manager of the ski shop, can hardly find fault in the outlook of her employees.
"I've been in the industry for 20 years and I can't remember another season as bad as this one," Andrew says. "We were trying to stay optimistic for a while but that's really starting to wear thin."
Andrew isn't the only one to glumly watch the season's big weekends-Thanksgiving, Christmas, MLK,
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President's Day-come and go to no avail. After last winter's epic season, Dan McCarthy-co-owner of Santa Fe Mountain Sports-stockpiled new inventory only to watch his merchandise collect dust this winter.
"This is way worse than anything we could dream up," McCarthy says. "I think that it's going to take a lot of years to recover from."
McCarthy says the dearth of business is a direct reflection of visitors and townies alike treating the view of the Sangre de Cristos from Santa Fe as an omen to the nonexistent skiing conditions present on its flanks.
"Our rental business has been almost nonexistent this year," McCarthy says. "So what's happening is you're not seeing the tourist business. The locals are still skiing to a certain extent, although it's my belief that Santa Feans are the most fickle skiers in the world. They only ski when it snows, no matter how good the conditions are up there and, from my perspective, [Ski Santa Fe] has done a miraculous job with what they have. But the fact is, that's still only about three runs."
Like others in the local ski retail industry, McCarthy has tried to salve his store's wounds by hosting blow-out sales, including his current "No Snow Sale" promotion with discounts of up to 75 percent. But he says such sales have little effect other than to help stores unload inventory.
"There's no margin to make up for all your other expenses," McCarthy says. "You literally can't keep your head above water. I try not to stress too much about it because I can't control it, but the bottom line is that essentially what I do all day is talk to creditors."
Most of the customers that McCarthy does see don't blink twice as they drive past Ski Santa Fe, Pajarito and Angel Fire on their way to Taos and the promised land of Colorado. That trend is cause for broader economic concerns throughout the regional tourism industry.
"It has a wide-reaching effect on the economy of New Mexico," Long says. "There's no question that a season like
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this hurts everyone. We don't do a ton of destination-business here at Pajarito, but all of those gas stations, restaurants and hotels in [Los Alamos] that would normally pick up a little bit of our drive-in business aren't receiving any of that at all."
It's a sentiment echoed by Art Bouffard, president of the New Mexico Lodging Association and executive director of the Santa Fe Lodgers Association.
"Just for the month of January in Santa Fe our occupancy is down one full percentage point from last year at the same time," Bouffard says. "Doesn't sound like a lot, huh? But it's a fairly significant number. Essentially if we talk room nights, we're talking roughly 3,000 fewer rooms were rented in the month of January this year than there were last year."
That roughly translates into more than $350,000 in lost revenue for area hotels in January alone. Bouffard believes the cause for the downturn has a direct link to the region's balmy winter.
Furthermore, Bouffard says visitors jaded by the current dismal ski season could have repercussions on local tourism for years to come.
"It's quite significant," Bouffard says. "[Tourists] are getting into a mindset where they're saying, 'Hey, we're not going to take those chances. We're going to make our reservations where we know we can find the snow.' That is a serious concern for us in the lodging industry. It's going to impact us several years down the road even if we do start to get good snow."
In an era of dramatic climate change, Bouffard says the city and the state need to bolster their efforts to promote things like culture and heritage in order to keep a consistent flow of visitors coming to New Mexico. But the trickle-down impact on tourism within Santa Fe proper has been blunted to some extent by the fact that the city itself is still the primary draw.
"Occupancy rates are down, but the
average daily rate is still holding steady," says Darlene Griego, director of the Santa Fe Visitors and Convention Bureau. "As bad as this season has been, I was
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concerned that it was going to be even worse."
Simon Brackley, interim president of the Santa Fe Chamber of Commerce,
says the poor skiing hasn't translated into general hysteria in the local business community.
"This is typically a slow time of year anyway so the expectations are fairly low but skiing certainly helps," he says.
Brackley's bigger concern lies in the prospect that the impending drought will cause collateral damage during the busy summer months.
That could certainly cause headaches in Santa Fe and beyond, according to Ed Polasko, the National Weather Service hydrologist. Polasko says that despite runoff from Colorado, Northern New Mexico's meager snowpack is already opening the door to catastrophic wildfires and severe water shortages.
In addition to the environmental dangers, the drought also will likely have a domino effect on the summer recreation industry.
Weak runoff means trouble for white-water rafting companies and rampant wildfires would effectively kick businesses like McCarthy's Santa Fe Mountain Sports-which supplements its winter skis and snowboards with summer mountain bikes-while it's down.
Dolores Maese, a Forest Service
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spokeswoman, acknowledges that this winter is comparable to 2002, when the Forest Service issued restrictions that resulted in the total closure of the Santa Fe National Forest. But she says the Forest Service is wary of the economic repercussions such a move would have on the region and cautions that any restrictions that come will happen only after there has been a thorough analysis of the existing conditions.
For his part, McCarthy fully expects
that the Forest Service will close access to the forest by Memorial Day if the area doesn't see any significant rainfall. But he says there are broader concerns inherent in a dehydrated summer that extend far beyond his bottom line.
"I am really worried about this summer," McCarthy says. "People seem to be treating it pretty lightly to be honest, but I think it's going to be a nightmare. One wrong move in these mountains and the whole place is going to go up like a torch."
There are no torches to extinguish. There are no signs of Andrea
Bocelli's throbbing larynx or Ricky Martin's thrusting pelvis either. No, the closing ceremonies at the Sandia Peak ski area are conducted without any of the garish pageantry or ludicrous artistry of the Olympic Games. But it's just as well. It was barely open to begin with.
On Feb. 26-the same day as closing ceremonies in Turin-Sandia Peak officially put an unceremonious
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nail in the coffin of its ski season. When it was operational, Sandia Peak scraped by with a miniscule snow base provided almost entirely by machines. The season is almost enough to make a cheerful guy like Guy Mazire sigh
sacre bleu
.
Mazire, a native of France, has worked in the local ski industry for more than 20 years and is currently manager of the food and beverage services at both Sandia Peak and Ski Santa Fe. Unlike many of his colleagues, Mazire doesn't mince words when discussing the dire straits that his employers-the Abruzzo brothers-are in.
"It's pretty sad," Mazire says. "I feel sorry for the boss. My paycheck hasn't changed, but they're losing a lot of money. But we're doing OK for what we have. We're still open at least."
Mazire laments that he has had to lay off at least 15 employees over the course of this ski season (and says he's lucky to have a job himself) but his mood turns positive when
discussing the current ski conditions at Ski Santa Fe. He's hardly alone. The unofficial mantra-echoed by McCarthy, DeJoia, Abruzzo and Sheppard-for the state of the mountain appears to be "the snow is great…for what's there."
"I think it's a little unjust that a lot of people assume that this is the season that never was," Sheppard says. "Years like this are very rare, but it's certainly not a total loss. While there may not be a lot of terrain open, what we do have is in excellent shape and the people who are making it up seem to be having a good time."
Among them, the Hogan family. Dan Hogan sits at a
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table inside the ski area's La Casa Cafeteria alongside his wife Glenda, his children Bridget and Toby and Toby's friends Edgar and Ivan. Dan Hogan sings the praises of the season that kinda was.
"There is a silver lining to every dark cloud," Hogan says. "There aren't huge crowds. The drive up the mountain is safe. There is no pressure and I've been able to teach my kids to ski. As a parent, it's been fantastic."
It's customers like the Hogans who have become heroes to the proprietors of the New Mexico winter tourism industry. But it's going to take more than good intentions and idle praise to pay the bills.
Then again, DeJoia says, it's also going to take a lot more than one crummy winter to knock businesses like Ski Santa Fe to their knees.
"We're not going to dry up and blow away," DeJoia says. "The key to any business that has its ups and downs is the management. Continued drought is eventually going to affect your bottom line, but you just have to do what you can, stay positive and ride out the tough seasons."
As the dire predictions of the season come to fruition, many cling to the hope that something can be salvaged from the season's dwindling days. Even the folks at Pajarito aren't ready to throw in the towel just yet.
"If we get snow, heck, we'll run with it, we'll go as long as we can with whatever we get if we get enough," Long says. "If we don't, we'll just enthusiastically look forward to next season. It's our hope that it won't be this bad, that it will be a better season and that we'll be able to pick up the pieces and move forward."
Forward is the only direction
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Richard Abruzzo knows. The unflappably optimistic vice president of Ski Santa Fe isn't willing to fold while Spring Break cards are still on the table.
"We went from an incredible season last year to obviously a very dry winter this winter," Abruzzo says. "The good news is that it could turn around and next year it could be a huge winter again. You never know. March has always been a wet month as far as snowfall, we could still get some snow this year and do brisk Spring Break business. We'll just have to see what happens."
Even if March goes out like a lamb, Abruzzo and the rest of the cogs in the winter tourism machine in New Mexico are fond of repeating, out of habit or necessity, a refrain familiar to skiing enthusiasts and Chicago Cubs fans alike.
There's always next year.
