For the past couple months, Joel Gratz just hasn’t been too excited. He’s not just a meteorologist whose Open Snow keeps tens of thousands of skiers tuned into weather. He’s also a skier.
But he found a flicker of that old fire this week, awaiting a pair of storms due to converge Thursday night over Colorado with cold temperatures from the north colliding with moisture from the south.
“Yes, it’s actually going to snow,” he said. “For a bit there I forgot what that was like. I remember now, and yes, this is fun.”
Gratz estimates Colorado’s high country could see 6 to 12 inches of snow. Ski hills south of Interstate 70 could see 12 to 18 inches as part of what could rank as the most significant snowstorm so far in this balmy, snow-starved winter.
“This setup is ripe for overproduction. Most setups are ripe for things to go wrong but this one, with a stalled cold front and good temperatures, I’ve seen this movie before and it ends well,” Gratz said.
It better. The next two weeks after this storm look warm and dry, much like the last month in the West, as a winter-killing high-pressure system camps across the Western portion of the country.
“I don’t see anything meaningful after this one for at least two weeks,” Gratz said. “My guess looking at the last 30 years, it’s probably about as low a snowpack as it can be.”
Colorado’s river basins have a snowpack around 56% of its long-term median. Temperatures over the past two months across the Central Rockies have been 9 to 15 degrees above average. Nine of 11 states in the West had the warmest December on record, dating back to 131 years of NOAA data.
Vail Resorts warns investors to brace for a drop in earnings
Vail Resorts reported a 20% decline in visits to its 37 North American ski areas through early January, citing one of the worst early season snowpacks across the West in more than 30 years.
Vail Resorts CEO Rob Katz last week told investors that snowfall at the company’s resorts in California, Colorado, Utah, Washington and British Columbia was down 50% compared with 30-year averages. Snowfall at Beaver Creek, Breckenridge, Crested Butte, Keystone, Vail and Park City Mountain Resort in Utah was down 60% compared with long-term averages, resulting in only 11% of the terrain open at its Colorado and Utah resorts in December.
The company said its ski school revenue was down 15% and dining revenue was down 16% in December compared with the previous season. In September, Vail Resorts told investors to expect resort earnings between $842 million and $898 million for its fiscal 2026. Last year the largest resort operator in North America earned $844 million.
Citing the slow start to the 2025-26 ski season, the company told investors last week to expect resort earnings to fall below the low end of the previous guidance. Vail Resorts’ stock has fallen from $170 a share in January 2025 to around $140 a share.
Traffic counts through the Eisenhower Johnson Memorial Tunnels in December — a portal to some of the nation’s busiest ski areas in Summit and Eagle counties — were the second lowest in 11 years, with the pandemic-addled December 2020 ranking lower.
Could 2025-26 rank among the worst winters ever?
Grumbling skiers are recalling the 2017-18 winter as they scrape over rocks and carve icy bumps. But that season did see big storms in the second half of February and it stayed snowy into April.
The old timers are looking past 2017-18. The leanest winter in Colorado was the infamous 1976-77 season. That winter half of the state’s ski areas remained closed through Christmas and New Years, with little natural snow. Colorado’s U.S. Sen. Floyd Haskell asked then-President Gerald Ford to declare the state’s mountain resort communities a financial disaster area in order to open up federal funds for high-and-dry mountain towns enduring a collapse in winter tourism. That did not happen.
Skier visits in Colorado fell 60% in 1976-77 to 3.65 million, down from 6 million the previous season.
But the strength of the handful of ski areas with snowmaking in 1976-77 — Keystone, Winter Park, Eldora and Vail — triggered what would become a multibillion-dollar investment across the industry in water rights and snowmaking. Colorado’s resort industry is surviving on that investment 50 years later.
Next up on the worst-ever-winter list is 1980-81, which hammered home the need for snowmaking. In 1980, there were about 435 acres blanketed with snowmaking at a handful of Colorado ski areas. Today, more than 5,800 acres at 23 Colorado ski hills are blanketed with machine-blown snow. (There are three Colorado ski hills without snowmaking: Ski Cooper, Monarch and Silverton Mountain.) Those 23 ski areas divert 1.5 billion to 2 billion gallons of water a year onto their mountains, with researchers estimating about 80% of that returns to watersheds when it melts.
In 1980-81, two resorts — Keystone and Loveland — fared well with robust snowmaking systems. Breckenridge and Steamboat, with zero snowmaking that season, did not open until February.
“Given stark contrast such as this, there is little wonder that resorts everywhere are going for their guns,” wrote Denver Post reporting legend Charlie Meyer in a March 19, 1981, column detailing tens of millions in investment in snowmaking following the painfully dry season. “Colorado skiing, with all the impact upon entire counties, has become such big business that it no longer can be left to chance.”
And now the rest of the country’s ski areas hedge against Mother Nature and years like this, with about 260 of the 337 U.S. ski areas deploying snow guns.
“So you’re telling me there’s a chance” for a turn-around
While snowmaking may keep the resort industry afloat, vibrancy only comes with natural snow. And this season, the state may be too deep in the hole to even reach normal.
But it’s not inconceivable. Remember March 2019, when a “bomb cyclone” blizzard dropped upwards of 3 feet on Colorado’s mountains, adding as much as 6 inches of snow water equivalent — the amount of liquid water if the snow was melted — to the then-lagging statewide snowpack?
“So something like that could happen over a span of 1-to-2 weeks that could push us back to normal,” Gratz said. “Will it happen? The chances are exceedingly low, but you can’t rule it out.”